Die On This Hill Review

Taylor Rioux
8 minutes ago
4 min read

Cultural touchstones are a bit hard to nail down in the internet era. The fast-paced nature of online communication — and almost the ephemeral nature of the attention economy that drives much of it — leaves us with few shared experiences, even among peers. In decades past, a movie or show would be seen and talked about for weeks or months beyond release, but this is truly rare in the modern context. Websites and influencers are always looking for the next big thing, and so too are the audiences that engage with them. Often, when a new work drops, the conversation surrounding it dies as quickly as it had arisen. Die On This Hill certainly won’t solve this problem, but it can help alleviate it.

Product: Die On This Hill

Designer: Sam Greszes

Publisher: Sam Greszes

Price: $30

Age: N/A

The developer of Die On This Hill, Sam Greszes, describes the game as “a party game about making, refuting, and reacting to the hottest takes anybody has ever seen.” Once you play it or see it in action, you can understand this to be a perfect distillation of the experience.

To start, each player is dealt a hand of “debate” cards with ideas or phrases. The player whose turn it is chooses debate cards, which are then connected to “Hill” cards that contain phrases like “Is”, "Is Not", or "Is Unable To Stop The Crushing Tide Of", in order to make an argument. For example, one might form the phrase “Society should ban monogamy”, at which point the active player must then make the argument to the other players. Once the active player creates the phrase, the other players may play their “Let Me Cook” card to argue against the phrase the active player created.

Both sides have 45 seconds to argue their chosen hill, and the other players react to the debate by tossing emoji tokens at the active players based on how the argument makes them feel. At the end of both debates, the person with the most emoji tokens in their tray wins and takes the hill card for the round. For the purposes of scoring, positive and negative emojis carry the same value.

There are some further interactions you can make, such as sabotaging an argument or wagering hill cards that allow you to change the tenor of the conversation on the fly. It creates this really exciting and dynamic flow to each round of a game that I find is hard to come by in the party game space.

The card selection lends itself exceedingly well to this format, containing cards that range from universal ideas to hyper-specific references. In this way, you’ll never feel like you’re left out of a conversation or an opportunity to engage with the game. Instead, those hyper-specific selections feel a bit like prized cards that you love to get if they fit within your wheelhouse. A real chance to let loose about something on your mind.

While I said earlier that there are few true cultural touchstones in the internet age, I think Die On This Hill’s mix of universal and specific topics allows players to connect across generations and in-groups, which is truly ideal for the party setting it has been designed for.

Speaking of cultural touchstones, the obvious comparison that comes to mind is Cards Against Humanity. Both games have a similar aesthetic and revolve around appeasing other players in an effort to earn points. Cards Against Humanity’s ubiquitous presence at parties for the last 15 years probably isn’t doing Die On This Hill any favors, as general sentiment has soured on it, but I ask you to consider this: what if Cards Against Humanity was good and fun and not racist?

I don't think the games are the same, and in some ways it feels like I’m trying to combat an invisible argument, but I think the comparisons will be inevitable for some at first glance. That said, cis certainly a “safer” game to play. It’s really only as vulgar or obscene as you make it to be in your arguments. The cards themselves are not one-liners to score points, meaning there are no true “dead” cards to play — they’re just prompts to get you to talk to your friends.

All of the game pieces are sturdy — there's no threat of them disintegrating as you play.

I do think that Sam’s experience as a PR professional has helped in this regard. That lengthy exposure to the internet and community discourse has surely helped shape both the format and the content of the game. Hard to imagine coming up with a game like this without having first-hand experience with the types of unhinged arguments people make in online spaces on every topic.

All things considered, I find the game to be extremely versatile in terms of what types of audiences you can bring into playing it, as well as how you play within those groups. It’s social media improv of the highest order. So yeah, I’ll say it outright — Die On This Hill is an amazing party game. That’s one hill I’m willing to die on, at least.