Review - Blankety Blank Game

Blankety Blank
Published by Milton Bradley
Designed by...?
For 3 or more players, aged 10 to adult

I'm going to let you in on a little secret... Reviewing games is pointless. Really, it is. Because I can never really tell you if you will like a game. I have enough trouble figuring out if I will like a game, and I know me pretty well.

The truth of it is, many times a game is only as good as the people you play it with.

That's why my reviews for bloody awful children's games tend to be positive... There is nothing more special than playing those games with my daughter.

And that is why my review for Blankety Blank is going to be positive.

Sort of.

My wife picked this up for me in a charity shop as part of a Christmas present. She basically searched charity shops for months on the run-up to Christmas, so she could present me with about 30 games on the day. There were some really rather wonderful games in the collection she amassed, including Scotland Yard and Shing Shang.

And then there was Blankety Blank.

I am sure most people remember the Blankety Blank television show.

Basically, there are two contestants. They each get given a sentence with a "blank" in it, and they need to provide one or more words to fill that "blank." Then six panellists do the same thing, and the contestant gets a point for each panellist who gives the same answer.

Well, the board game is a pretty faithful recreation of the television show. There is a book with over 80 unique games in it, and one person becomes the presenter and is in charge of asking the questions. The other two players (or groups of players) are the contestants.

The presenter gives each contestant two sentences. The contestants give answers, and compare them to the six answers in the book to see how many points are scored. Points are tracked on a peg board with plastic pegs, and at the end, the team with the most pegs goes through to the next round.

The peg board - cute, but pointless.

In the next round, the player is given another sentence, and has to fill in the "blank" again. There are three possible solutions, worth various amounts of points.

Finally, the contestant and the presenter both write down a word to complete one more sentence. If the answers match, both players get points. Then another player becomes the presenter, and another round begins.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that sounds pretty boring. I know, because I was pretty bored writing it.

And it is a bit boring. Worse than that, it is not very fair. You see, the maximum number of points a player can score depends on how many matching answers are in the book. If four of the six answers match the player's answer, then the player wins four points. That would be fine if the distribution of answers was always the same, but it isn't. For example, you might get a question where all six answers in the book are different, meaning it is only possible to score a maximum of one point, no matter what answer you give.

So yeah, on paper, this sounds like a pretty poor excuse for a game, and I really wasn't expecting much when I rolled it out at my recent games night. In fact, I rolled it out for a joke, assuming we would play for about five minutes, and then do something else.

But then a weird thing happened... We actually had fun.

I'll be honest, the main reason we had fun is because one of the guys in my gaming group suggested I should use the word "penis" instead of "blank" when reading the sentences.

Yes, I am aware that is incredibly immature.

And yes, the word he suggested was actually a bit ruder than "penis."

So, we started playing, and I read the first sentence...

"After two years of yoga, Paul was so fit, he could put his 'penis' in his ear."

The Penisy Penis... Er... Blankety Blank game book

Good grief.

"Josephine sneezed so hard that her 'penis' turned inside out."

Really?

"At the airport, as Jack was crossing the runway, his 'penis' got sucked into a jet engine."

I could barely read the questions I was laughing so hard. My eyes were streaming, I couldn't catch my breath.

And, YES, I am aware that is incredibly immature.

And I don't care.

And I'm not even going to tell you some of the answers my gaming group gave.

Blankety Blank is a pretty terrible game. There are long periods when some players have to sit out waiting for a chance to do something, and replayability is limited. And it has paper money. I hate paper money.



Paper money. I hate paper money...

And yet, Blankety Blank ended up being a lot of fun. I'm not suggesting I can chuck out Lords of Waterdeep, Kingdom Builder, and Smallworld; but I honestly feel this game has a place in my collection. After all, it is nice to be a bit silly every now and again.

As for whether you would like the game... I can't say. But here's a test. Complete the following sentence:

"I think anyone who likes the Blankety Blank game is a 'penis.'"

Review - The Lord of the Rings: Nazgul

The Lord of the Rings: Nazgul
Published by WizKids Games
Designed by Bryan Kinsella and Charlie Tyson
For 3-5 players, aged 14 to adult

Well, this looks like a nice family-friendly game...

Being stubborn can be costly.

Recently, it cost me about £25, and approximately four hours of my life.

You see, I am a big The Lord of the Rings fan, so when I saw The Lord of the Rings: Nazgul in an online sale, I was immediately tempted. Of course, I had read the reviews on BoardGameGeek. I knew it was a very unpopular game. I knew the component quality was low. I knew the theme was not well implemented.

I knew.

But I'm stubborn. I did mention that, right?

I'm stubborn enough to convince myself that everybody else is wrong, just because I like the idea of something.

In this case, I convinced myself that everyone else was wrong about The Lord of the Rings: Nazgul, because I really, really wanted to like the game. I was enamoured by the concept of being one of the evil Nazgul, and plotting the downfall of the Free People of Middle Earth. I wanted this to be a great game.

As I was considering making the purchase, I reviewed what other people had said about the game. I had an argument against every complaint.

I told you, I'm stubborn.

"The theme doesn't work, because the Nazgul are backstabbing each other."

Yeah, okay. But with a bit of imagination you can overlook that sort of issue with the theme.

"The component quality is poor, the board is ugly, and the miniatures are impossible to tell apart."

Yeah, okay. But the miniatures look good, the board is functional enough, and the cards don't look that thin to me. And those little cubes are lovely.

What a wonderfully thematic board... For a game about cleaning portholes.

"The competitive co-op rules don't work because if someone starts losing he or she can tank the game for everyone, ensuring there is no winner."

Yeah, okay. But that is a problem with the players, not the game. If everyone plays to win, it should be a lot of fun.

"The text on the cards is really small."

I have good eyes.

"The main cube drawing element for resolving combat is fiddly."

You're just being picky.

"The game doesn't have a lot of interesting decisions. You just do the same thing every turn."

Just shut up already. I'm buying it. All right? Shut up.

"There are spelling mistakes on the board!"

SHUT UP!

Yeah. I ignored all the warning signs. Somehow I managed to convince myself that I could see past the problems to find an unfairly overlooked core of delicious hobbit-murdering goodness... er... badness. I convinced myself that this was a great and misunderstood game.

Then the game arrived.

It is not a great and misunderstood game.

Reading the rules, and then setting up and playing the first game, old arguments came back to haunt me.

"The theme doesn't work, because the Nazgul are backstabbing each other."

You're right. The theme doesn't work. The Nazgul were loyal to Sauron, and worked only for his benefit. There was no in-fighting or petty politics. They were wraiths bound to a higher will. And the less said about Sam Gamgee leading an army of Free People to destroy the Witch King the better. This is just stupid.

You're ruining The Lord of the Rings.

"The component quality is poor, the board is ugly, and the miniatures are impossible to tell apart."

Yeah, you know what, the miniatures are hard to tell apart. It's confusing. And having half the information you need for your turn on the base of your characters (yay, Heroclix!) and half on cards and player aids in front of you is awkward. And yeah, the cards are thin, and the board is not only ugly, but incredibly confusing.

Here they are... Tim, Jim, Tybalt, Archibald, and Louise.

Those cubes are lovely though. I like those a lot.

One of my friends got really bored playing this game...

"The competitive co-op rules don't work because if someone starts losing he or she can tank the game for everyone, ensuring there is no winner."

That's true, but there is an even bigger problem with the comperoperative... competerative... comperative... comp-operative... Yeah, comp-operative, I like that one... There is an even bigger problem with the comp-operative rules, but I didn't notice it until my second game. At one point, I sent the Witch King along with another player to fight a battle. The other player received some wounds, and chose to allocate them to the Witch King.

"Ha ha!" my "friend" exclaimed. "Thus I have backstabbed you to save my own forces from harm. Stick that in your halfling pipe and smoke it."

Very good play.

Or it would have been if it hadn't resulted in the death of the Witch King, which resulted in the loss of the battle, which put us on the back foot for the rest of the game and pretty much guaranteed we could not win.

Well done. Very good play.

This is a massive flaw in a comp-operative game. If you focus too much on backstabbing the other players, you cannot hope to win. If you work together to win, the bidding section at the start of each turn (which is the most interesting bit) is almost entirely pointless, and the game becomes incredibly pedestrian. Either way, no-one is having any fun.

"The text on the cards is really small."

It is really small. And there is lots of it. And most of the power cards players have access to have multiple abilities to select from. Waiting for people to read through all the options to make any kind of decision is agonising.

"The main cube drawing element for resolving combat is fiddly."

Damn right it's fiddly. And it's pretty much 90 percent of the game. After bidding for various things, such as extra units and powers, each player allocates a Nazgul to a battle. You then resolve battles. This starts with a process of flipping hero cards until you have a certain number that all match the location where the battle is happening. These heroes have special powers. The powers are boring, and I cannot be bothered to explain them.

Having drawn the heroes, players need to count out all the Hero (white) and Free People (blue) cubes to go into a draw cup. The players then choose their forces (green, orange, and black cubes), and add those to the cup. Finally, each Nazgul present adds a cute little cube with a Fell Beast icon on it.

Working this out takes forever. People play powers to add or reduce the number of cubes, heroes add or reduce cubes, things slide up and down on tracks, players count cubes and then double check what they have. Painful.

And what happens with all these cubes?

The cubes aren't made of wood. Which is nice.

Each player reaches into the cup and draws a certain number. Enemy cubes drawn inflict wounds on the players, and player cubes inflict wounds on the Heroes and Free People. If the players kill all armies and heroes at a location, they win the battle.

If you think that sounds incredibly dull, then you're thinking right. It is monumentally dull. It feels more like playing with an abacus than allocating forces to a battle.

The most offensive thing of all is that this cube concept is the main bit of game. It is the thing that defines the game. And yet the cube-pulling could be replaced with a single die roll, with modifiers applied for enemy forces, heroes, allied forces, and special powers.

Of course, if you took away the cube-pulling, it would be far too obvious that there really isn't much of a game here. Every turn you would simply place your Nazgul on a battle space and then roll a dice. Which leads us nicely to...

"The game doesn't have a lot of interesting decisions. You just do the same thing every turn."

Yup. Every turn you bid, place your Nazgul on a space, and then faff around with some cubes. It is utterly dull.

"There are spelling mistakes on the board!"

Yes all right. I admit it. I tried to ignore all this, but I can't. Spelling mistakes! On the board! Come on, WizKids, you aren't even trying!

"Strages?" Really?

This game is a disaster. It has the dubious honour of being one of the worst games I have ever had the misfortune to play. In fact, it is the only game I have ever played where every single attempt to play it ended with all the players agreeing to give up rather than finish.

In the first game, we threw in the towel after a few rounds because one of the players was having a truly awful time, and I kept fouling up rules. The second game we played almost to the end, but quit when we realised the death of the Witch King and too much backstabbing had left us in a position where we couldn't win no matter what we did (we just tallied up victory points at that point to determine a winner). In the third game, we attempted the full co-operative rules, which feel tacked on, and which remove the blind bidding (the most interesting bit in the whole game). That third game lasted one turn, at which point we all agreed the game should never hit the table again.

Okay, some people will say I'm being unfair being so negative after just three (aborted) plays. My counter is this: I tried to play the game three times, and three times everyone at the table decided to quit and play something else.

That, as far as I am concerned, tells me everything I need to know about this game. There is no way anyone could convince me to try it again.

After all, I'm stubborn.

Review - Temple Run: Speed Sprint Card Game

Temple Run: Speed Sprint Card Game
Published by Spin Master
Designed by Brady Lang
For 2 to 4 players, aged 8 to adult

Jump! Left! Right! ARGH!

So, I have this dream...

In the dream, I'm running away from a monster.

Wait, wait. Hold on. This sounds familiar.

Oh, that's right. Recently I reviewed Temple Run: Danger Chase, a surprisingly good little dice game based on the popular smartphone app, in which you frantically roll dice in order to escape a demonic monkey.

Well, Temple Run: Speed Sprint is from one of the same designers as Danger Chase, and tries to recreate that same nightmarish situation with a simple deck of cards and an electronic randomiser.

Should be fun, right?

I saw Speed Sprint  in a discount stores, priced at £1.99. Seemed reasonable for a card game, so I picked it up without having particularly high expectations. The box is really flimsy (one of those horrible folding flap boxes that even most card games avoid these days), and inside is a ridiculously small number of components. Honestly, the box is pretty large, obviously to draw attention to the game on the shelf, but about 90 percent of that box is just air. Here's a picture, so you can see what I mean:

Big air.

Not since The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Game has there been a board game with such a high air-to-game ratio.

The game actually comprises a single deck of 60 cards (including four character cards) and a pretty cool electronic idol, which doubles as a timer and a randomiser.

The cards in the deck are colour-coded, and each one represents a different move or special power: Jump, Right, Left, Slide, and Invisibility.

Left! Right! Jump! Cha Cha Slide!

Players are allocated a character card (so they know what player number they are), and a hand of cards. Then someone whacks the timer, and the game begins.

The idol calls out a player number, and then an action. If the player called has the named card (or an Invisibility card, which is wild), he or she has three seconds to discard the card and press the idol, at which point another player is called. Failure to discard a card in time pauses the game, and forces the player to draw a new card. First player to discard all of his or her cards is the winner.

Done.

Nothing more to see here.

It is just a simple, speed-based game. With the exception of being asked to "pass," which involves selecting one of your cards and giving it to another player, there are no decision points in the game. You just grab the right card, chuck it on the table, slam the idol, and carry on. Pretty mindless, and not particularly great.

It is fun enough for a few minutes, but the biggest problem is that the idol seems to give you just a bit too much time to find the card you need. Even playing with one hand behind your back at all times, it is still incredibly easy to play the right card before the timer runs out. That being the case, the game just doesn't seem to be as frantic as it should be.

Additionally, the cards are low quality, and considering they are being manipulated at speed, I can see them getting creased and scuffed very quickly.

Oh look. It's smiling at us.

Overall, for £1.99, I think it was a worthwhile purchase; but it really is nothing special. It is certainly not a game I would recommend to anyone. For fans of the Temple Run app, the Danger Chase board game is a much better option.

Anyway, while I've got your attention, I want to tell you about this other dream I have.

I'm in class, and I'm wearing a tinfoil hat; and the teacher is asking me how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism...

Review - Unspeakable Words

Unspeakable Words
Published by Playroom Entertainment
Designed by James Ernest and Mike Selinker
For 2-6 players, aged 10 to adult

Being a writer has its downside. Sure, you get to spend all day crafting worlds, inventing characters, and generally doing what you love.

But...

First of all, people have a tendency to buy you pens. Usually pens with your name on them.

I know my name, thanks. And, apart from writing shopping lists, I haven't used a pen since about 2005.

And when it comes to games, people always seem to think a writer is going to like word games. Scrabble, Boggle, Upwords...

No.

No, no, no.

Words are tools. I don't play with tools.

Except my friend, James.

As a writer, I want board games that create stories. Games where I get to rearrange letters into words couldn't interest me less.

So, I tend to have quite a few word games in my collection, but there is only one that I actually bought myself. That one game is Unspeakable Words.

I picked it up years ago, when I saw it going cheap. I knew it was just a word game, but there was a little twist that appealed to me: A Cthulhu theme. Of course, this was back in the days when the Cthulhu theme was not quite so prevalent. Nowadays, Cthulhu is overused almost as much as ellipses in blog posts.

But anyway...

I was intrigued by the comical art, the fun spin on a theme I enjoy, and (of course) the promise of 30 cute Cthulhu pawns.

Frankly, those pawns are worth the price of admission alone.

We could be in trouble.

In fact, the presentation for the entire game is lovely. You get 96 cards depicting letters of the alphabet, the 30 pawns, and a 20-sided dice, which I am sure is a little nod to the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.

What is so nice about the cards is the way the theme is incorporated. For example, on cards depicting "C", you get the legend "C is for Cthulhu" and a nice picture of Cthulhu taking a nap with his teddy bear. If you don't know why that is funny, you clearly aren't a H.P. Lovecraft fan.

Additionally, each card incorporates a piece of art that is more typically associated with the letter in question. Seeing Azathoth eating an apple is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

That penguin looks mighty nervous.

So the presentation is great. What about the game?

Sadly, the game is not really much to write home about (with a personalised pen, no doubt). The concept is that players are researching arcane lore, revealing words that no person was ever meant to spell out. Each player starts the game with five pawns, representing sanity (this is a Cthulhu game, after all), and seven cards.

Taking it in turns, players create words from the cards they have. The cards used to spell the word are placed on the table for everyone to see. The word is then scored based on the number of angles in the letters, which is another nice nod to the weird fiction that inspired the game. For example, the letter "Z" scores two points, while the letter "C" scores none.

At first, this might seem unusual. After all, the commonly used letter "A" scores five points, but the letter "Z" only scores two points. However, this is a surprisingly clever system when you realise that, after scoring your points, you have to roll a sanity check. To do this, you roll the 20-sided dice, and you must get equal to or greater than the total value of the word you just scored. If you don't, you lose a sanity point.

This means people who score high-value words are at greater risk of going insane. Thematically, this makes sense, and it also levels the playing field. Those players who are experts at creating high-scoring words run the risk of going insane, giving those people who have been scoring low-value words a chance to make a comeback.

The winner is the first player to score 100 points, or the last player with any sanity.

Cthulhu's taking a nap. He does that.

So, yeah. it's just a word game. However, it has just enough going on to make it a little more interesting for me. The theme, the comedy elements in the art, the cute pawns, the push-your-luck element associated with creating high-value words, and the fact that people who are not great at word games still have a fighting chance, all adds up to make something that is just a little bit more than the sum of its parts. There are even some optional rules to spice things up a bit more, by giving people a chance to recover sanity, or to make up gibberish words if they are close to going insane.

This game may not be a Deep One, but if I have to play a word game I want to play one where I am not completely bored by the time Mi-Go comes around, and that means the only choice Hastur be Unspeakable Words.

...

...

I'll get my coat.

Review - Go Piggy Go

Go Piggy Go!
Published by Mattel Games
Designed by top secret government agents
For 2-4 players, aged 5 to adult

Surprises are nice.

Okay, not all surprises are nice. Being surprised by an axe-wielding lunatic on your way home from the pub isn't nice.

But lots of surprises are nice.

For example, last year, when I asked my daughter what she wanted for her birthday, she said "Go Piggy Go!"



Aww, look!

I had no idea what she was talking about until I looked it up on the Internet. Turns out it is a family board game that she had seen advertised on the television. I had been playing board games with my daughter for a little while (Parcheesi, Dominoes, Memory Games, Snakes and Ladders), but it still came as quite a surprise that she was asking for games for her birthday, especially games I had not even heard of.

But the biggest surprise of all is that Go Piggy Go! is actually good.

This is not something that is immediately apparent. It isn't like opening the fridge and finding an elephant. It is more like opening the fridge and finding elephant-shaped paw prints in the butter.

You see, when you set up the game, it looks like every other roll and move game ever.

The aim of the game is simple: Each player has three cute plastic pigs that need to be moved from a starting space at one end of the board, to a food trough at the other. So, on a player's turn, he or she rolls the dice, and moves one pig that number of spaces. The path is very linear, and there really is no decision making at this point. Just move as much as possible.

Sounds awful, right?

Right.

But there is a cool little twist. In the middle of the board there is a plastic wolf riding a tractor. When you press the wolf, plastic hay bales shoot out of the front of the tractor. If a player rolls the side of the dice that has a number and a wolf symbol, he or she gets to choose what to do: move a pig, or fire the tractor.

Of course, children always want to fire the tractor.



Aww, look!

The purpose of firing the tractor is to hit the pigs. Any pig hit is sent back to the start (or one of two pre-set checkpoints).

This is not a major element of the game. Sometimes the wolf only gets fired once or twice, and often there is not much point in doing so; but it does add a nice little dexterity sub-game, and usually raises a few laughs when "Daddy's pig" gets sent back to the start. Again. And again.

And again.

Yeah. Big laughs.

However, what really raises this game above some of its peers, and makes it something that is actually a bit interesting to play, is the way in which the pigs interact.

When a pig moves, it can enter a space with another pig. It can do this to "jump" the pig and then carry on; however, it is also possible to enter the space with another pig and then stop there. When this happens, you stand your pig on top of the pig that was already there. From that point on, if the pig on the bottom moves, the big on the top moves with it.

Genius.

You can hop your pigs onto other pigs, and then get a free ride from one end of the board to the other. And of course, if the pig on the top ever wants to move, he can do so without moving the big on the bottom.

And the final wrinkle in the rules is that no more than two pigs can occupy a space. That means it is possible to block routes across the board.



Aww, look!

In practice, you see a lot of pigs hopping on other pigs, creating roadblocks the other players cannot circumvent. Of course, those road blocks then become the prime target for the hay-firing wolf.

It all becomes surprisingly tactical.

Okay, it's not Chess, but there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye. More than enough for adults to actually enjoy the game rather than merely tolerating it for the sake of the children.

I also rather enjoyed the little in-jokes and puns: The pigs take piggyback rides on each other, each player controls three little pigs, and rather than blowing down houses made of straw, the wolf uses hay bales to knock down pigs.

So, surprisingly, I would recommend this game to anyone with young children. It is fun, fast, colourful, and just tactical enough to keep older players interested. It won't win any awards, but it is better than it really has any right to be.

And the pigs are cute.