Game Review

Concept:

Answer randomly generated riddles -- find your inner commedian.

Gameplay:

Players are all given a pad of paper and a pencil. One player is chosen as judge for the round.

The judge draws one question card and two noun cards -- reads the riddle to the group -- and then starts the two-minute timer.

As the timer counts down, the players all write down as many responses as they can to the riddle.

At the end of two minutes, the responses are gathered together and shuffled. A second player is chosen to read the responses to the judge. (This avoids handwriting recognition problems.) The judge then chooses the best two responses to the riddle.

The players who wrote the winning responses receive one of the noun cards for that round.

The role of judge changes each round until all players have been judge. Once all of the players have judged a round, they count the number of noun cards they have collected -- the winner is the player who collected the most noun cards.

Winning Conditions:

• The player who acquired the most noun cards, wins.
  

Our Opinion:

Party games can be tough to choose between. Often a game is fun depending upon the crowd playing. This game aspires to be fun regardless of the crowd. It revels in witty one-liner jokes, and as far as the zombies are concerned it was very successful at being a fun party game.

The game is simple to learn and any number of players can play if you abandon the scoring rules. The biggest challenge is getting your punchline to hit the funnybone of the current judge. This can be quite the challenge when you have to write for a specific audience. When we reviewed this game, we had our normal group that regularly plays Magic: The Gathering present -- jokes that applied to magic went over far better than usual -- but we recognized that at a family gathiering (e.g. Thanksgiving or Christmas party), the punchlines would fall flat because not everyone would understand them.

During our review session the funniest responses came from the question "Why is a clown better than a tiger?" The winning two responses were: " Tigers don't use cream pies to hunt..." and "You know what they say about the size of a man's feet." (Yes, we have a very strange sense of humor.)

This game is a great pick for a party game -- It includes everyone, rarely puts anyone in an embarassing spotlight, and provides opportunity for levity. Even our reviewer who claims to hate all party games actually was enjoying it... a lot. It's humor in your own dialect -- so you can't blame someone else if you don't have fun. We think it's a "must have" if you like party games.

Where to buy:

Check your local game store or online here -- it costs about US $25.