I have said time and again how I'm not a big fan of party games. They're usually fairly unbalanced, often pointless, and too silly. So I'm always excited when a good one like
Dixit or
Wits and Wagers comes along and proves to me how much fun they can be. Two new party games arrived recently which I was lucky enough to have a go at. Here's some thoughts....
Say Anything: Family Edition - Within five minutes of playing Say Anything, it was clear that it was designed by the same guy as Wits & Wagers. Like W&W, you don't have to know the correct answer every time to win. Betting on the correct answer is just as good. But this time you are all answering a certain question asked by one of the players (call him the Questioner) such as "What would make long drives more fun?" or "What am I most likely to become famous for?" The questioner secretly picks their favourite and then the others all bet on which answer the Questioner picked. Guesses are revealed, points are scored, and so on and so on until you start to know WAY too much about certain people.
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It's extremely simple and pretty clever in that you can bet correctly enough times to win even if your answer never gets picked. But it definitely lacks the strategy of W&W. It's more a game about getting to know the other players than about shrewd gambling. Mind you we were playing the Family edition and not the original but I think the rules are the same. But still it's a very good party game, just a pure party game like more of an icebreaker and as such not something that I would play too often. If you liked
Apples to Apples, then I'd say you'll probably love this one.
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| "Wa Wa Wee Wa!" - what I thought my Romanian friend would say to his pet if only he could actually speak to it. |
Faux-Cabulary - Along a similar, albeit much sillier vein, comes this little game of making up imaginary words to fit random definitions. It's kinda like a reverse game of
Balderdash where the words don't actually exist.
The clever idea behind this game, though, is that you need to make the words up out of the three dice you randomly draw at the beginning of the round. Each side of the 21 different "word cubes" has a different part of a word like "uber" or "robo" or something like that. So you have to be creative but you are also a bit limited by the cubes you draw. Sometimes coming up with a word that even remotely sounds like "an Eastern European way of trimming your back hair" is near impossible. So you end up just putting together something silly, covering it up, and sliding it in the centre with the other entries. One player sits out and judges every turn, picking the word that they think fits the wacky definition the best.
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Notice I've used the words random, silly, and wacky already to describe the game. Yeah. I don't think I'm the target audience for this one. Most of my group of 6 was amused for about 10 minutes and then tired of it very quickly (although one of my friends was howling the whole time and would have gone on playing it forever). It wasn't so much the silliness of it but the fact that we quickly ran out of words. By the later rounds, we got a bit tired of seeing word after word with "uber" in it. The options seemed limited by the dice and the humourous answers yielded the occasional chuckle from most of us and not much more.
Perhaps my friend Robyn summed it up best when she exclaimed, "This would be really fun if you were drunk!" So, yeah, not my thing but definitely there is an audience out there (like my laughing Romanian buddy) who will really like it. Perhaps a very drunk audience....
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| "The smell of an old person"... Um, 'Super-icky-tastic'? |
