Fun, fast trivia game ... But, well, the board is uhm..., It just really doesn't go together.
Fun game for the game play - but the board is just weird and from the preteens, teens and adults who played - everyone was a bit put off by the weird board.<br /><br />WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW - If you plan to gift this game, you might want to look at it first in person. Heads up for "drug" references, political statements, vaccination statements and more.<br />More details below. Each section of the review is noted in CAPS for easy perusal.<br /><br />GAME PLAY: This game was easy to learn - we had 2 adults, 1 older teen and a preteen at the task for the first crack at our new game. The premise is that the squares on the board correlate with categories on the cards. The cards then have a name or word on them that the person tries to describe to their teammate so they can guess the word, name, place, action etc. You do this as many times as you can against the timer. It gets fast and furious and caused a lot of laughs!<br /><br />QUALITY: The game is well made, the cards are nice but REALLY hard to draw out of the box that you need to rapidly draw them out of during game play.<br /><br />AGE RANGE - the age of the game is marked 12+, which I think is Okay, but really I think it's probably high school and up.  There are plenty of references and names that the younger folks won't get at all and they only get to skip a card once during each turn, so it really is a game that works well for adults too - even Gen X haha!<br /><br />THE WEIRD: Now here's where the rest comes in. The board design is just WEIRD. At first you think it's just a colorful menagerie of pop culture references and goofy things and then as you look closer at the board during play, you see there are some odd and out of place things that I think someone needs to know if they are going to buy this and is the exact reason I CANNOT recommend this as a gift.<br /><br />The board has characters showing angry, sign carrying Covid/Lockdown protesters, which the happy, masked, and vaccinated character is standing nearby.  We had all sides of this discussion at the table and everyone was equally put off by this really incongruous political plug.<br /><br />There are a peculiar number of characters urinating and defecating on the board. It comes across as an attempt to be an amusement for the teens that might be playing the game - but that doesn't fit with LOTS of the names, references etc that are on the cards for the game play - it is like the board itself is unrelated to the play of the game in a strange way. Even the teen and preteen, which both appreciate a good poop joke here and there, thought the number of characters doing this was just weird.<br /><br />The pop culture references are cute - there is a reference to Star Wars, Harry Potter, King Kong, Pirates of the Carribean, the Beatles and more. That is what we noticed first. The smaller details of the character taking photos of a dead character, bleeding dinosaurs,  character getting high, lots more dead characters, voodoo, psychedelic mushroom use, pot farming, mask wearing all didn't get notice until later in the game play.  This and a couple other things really made the game feel like it was designed by someone else and that a different team jumped in to make the board and the board ended up drastically and oddly unrelated to the game.<br /><br />BOTTOM LINE: Fun, fast play game with a board that just doesn't fit the game. The board would have been a hit in my university art department for the design, references and political bend,  but it really fails in being a good use for the artwork here.<br /><br />Whatever ones take is on the things is neither here nor there- but it's odd enough and is really unfitting with the game play itself so much that it really is worth making buyers aware of.
Rating: 2 stars