Even though there have been holiday decorations up in stores across the country for more than a month, I personally can’t believe it’s already November and the holidays are right around the corner!  Now, for many of you in the game world you know that before we can dig in to our Thanksgiving turkey, we have to meet in Chicago for ChiTag!  And the game I’m going to review this week, Befuzzled, will be the star of the Fun Q Games booth.

I’ve had Befuzzled on my desk for a little while but waited to write my review for a couple reasons.  First, I think this is a great family party game for the holidays – especially for a crowd of slightly over-served adults, teens and kids.  Second, if you are stopping by ChiTag I wanted to remind you to stop by the Fun Q Games booth #219 – not only are they nice people, but they have 2 games worth checking out (Befuzzled and Triplica) and you’ll be able to buy it there!

So what is this game I speak so highly of?  Befuzzled is a speed/action game with quick rounds; which is a nice combination for a family-friendly party game.  There are 3 types of cards in the box: Action cards, Flip cards and Shape cards.   Action cards list actions (duh!) like “Bark like a Dog” and “Snap Your Fingers.”  You lay 8 of these cards face-up on the table in 2 rows of 4.  Then you take the Shape card deck and lay one card on top of each Action card so you can still see the title of the action.  Next you pick a player to start the round and give them the deck of Flip cards. This person is the “judge” and they turn over the top Flip card so everyone can see what symbol it is.  Whoever does the action under the matching shape first, wins the round and gets to keep the Flip card.  The Flip deck gets passed to the next player and they’re the judge for the next round.  Play continues until there are no cards left in the Flip deck and then you can choose to count up cards and keep score, or just claim a winner for the game.

The instructions are pretty specific as to how many cards should be in the draw deck (5 x the number of players) but us beer-drinking adults skipped over that rule.  We did find that this game played really well with a larger group and while the instructions say 3-8 players, I’m not sure the game would be quite as much fun with only 3 players.  What I do like about this game is that it comes in a nice small box so it’s easy to pop in a bag and bring it to a friend’s or relative’s holiday party – or heck, you could even give it as a hostess gift!  (Man, am I filled with great ideas today!)

Befuzzled Stats:
~$14 ChiTag, Specialty Retailers and Amazon.com
3-8 players (although I recommend at least 4)
~10-30 minutes (you decide how many rounds you want to play!)
Ages 7 and Up

**For $2 admission to ChiTag, visit HERE

Sometimes it takes me a little while to review a game that’s been on the market for years but I really enjoy.  And even though these games aren’t NEW they’re still worth reviewing because games don’t “go bad” unless they’re trivia based or heavily rely on pop culture or politics.  It’s what makes games so great!  If you pick up a game from the 1950s, odds are very good that it’s still playable (provided none of the key pieces wandered off in the last 60 years).  This week’s game isn’t quite that old, but it was a 2003 nominee for the Kinderspiel des Jahres* so it’s been out for close to a decade, but it would still be just as good if it came out a month ago.  What game am I talking about?  It’s Sherlock, Sherlock! An elementary game of memory and deduction. (that’s the last bad joke in the article, I promise.)

Sherlock is essentially a memory game – but a memory game that does not bore the adults!  The game starts with 8 cards placed face-up in a circle around the rest of the deck.  Players take time memorizing the pictures on each card and then they are flipped face-down.  The youngest player gets to be Sherlock first and they take the Sherlock mover (which is a card, see right) and place it above whichever face-down card they’d like to guess.   Then they guess and flip it over.  If they’re wrong their turn is over and you have to wonder what they were doing for the last minute instead of memorizing pictures!  If they’re correct the card stays face-up they get to continue and guess again – and this is where the game gets fun!  There are red arrows next to a number on the top of every card and that indicates which direction and how many cards over you need to go.  Where the Sherlock mover lands is the card you MUST guess next.  If you can’t recall correctly, your turn is over and all the cards are flipped over again.  But if you’re right you keep that card face-up and advance the Sherlock mover based on what the number and arrow says.  When the Sherlock mover finally lands on a face-up card you get to collect it and replace it with a new one from the deck (of course showing everyone what it is before you place it face-down).  Then make sure all of the cards are face-down and it’s the next player’s turn.  The goal is to be the first player to collect 6 cards.

What is so amazing about this game is that after a little bit you’ll realize that you can plan out shorter moves by remembering the number and arrow direction on the cards.  I also like that you can play with 6 (easiest), 7, or 8 (hardest) cards in the circle without taking away the fun and excitement of the game.  Sherlock was invented by Reinhard Staupe and this spring I wrote about another one of Reinhard Staupe’s games, Saddle Up! which is another cute game for kids 5 and up.  In that article I gave a little information about the inventor and if you’d like to read about Reinhard or Saddle Up! click HERE.

* The Kinderspiel des Jahres is awarded every year (since 1989, although prior to 2001 it was called the “Sonderpreis Kinderspiel”) to the best children’s game judged by German game critics.  It’s the “kid sister” to the Spiel des Jahres which is awarded to the best family game.

Sherlock Stats:

• ~$7-10 Amazon.com, FunagainGames.com, and some mom & pop game stores
• 2-5 players
• ~15 min. (but it kind of depends on how good you are at remembering!)
• Ages 5 and up

Two weeks in a row we’re going to discuss games I came across for the first time at ChiTag (the Chicago Toy and Game Fair) – it’s unintentional, but pretty interesting. When I first saw FlipOut it was called Patchwork and the inventor/self-manufacturer, Daniel Weaver, had a booth with just this one game, but when you saw it you just kind of got it.  I love games that you “get” when you see them – I gives you that “well duh, why didn’t I think of that, okay let’s play” feeling.

As you can see from the photo, FlipOut is all about patterns.  Each card has a pattern on both sides – not necessarily the same pattern – and each player has 6 cards in their holder.  Now only you can see one side of your cards, and the other players can see the other side.  The goal of the game is to collect as many cards as possible.  You collect cards by getting 4, 5, or 6 cards of the same pattern in a row either in your cards facing you or on the visible-to-you side of your opponent’s cards.

On your turn you get to make any two of the following moves (and they can be made to the cards in your holder or in any opponent’s):

1. Flip: Turn any card around in its holder
2. Switch: Switch the positions of any two cards
3. Swap: Trade one of your cards for one from an opponent (keep the same side facing you)
4. Swap 2: Trade two adjacent, same-color cards from your holder with two adjacent, same-color cards in an opponent’s holder
5. Score: Collect a set of 4-6 adjacent same-color cards from your holder
6. Swipe: Collect a set of 4-6 cards from an opponent’s holder — BUT you must give them one card (kind of as payment for stealing their cards)

You play until you run out of cards and then everyone counts up how many they’ve collected and the person who has the most wins.  Simple as pie.

I asked Daniel Weaver how he came up with this pretty unique game and here’s what he said,

“I discovered FlipOut where many great American inventions are discovered – in the shower!  The previous evening, I had played poker with friends and while shampooing my hair I started thinking “what have I never seen before in games?”  I was visualizing the previous evening’s poker game and realized that the backs of playing cards are never used!  By the time I was done drying off, FlipOut existed in my head almost exactly as it is today.”

You can see that not much has changed since Gamewright has licensed the concept – the game play is the same, the cards have the same patterns (although the colors look brighter) but the biggest difference is the packaging.  The old Patchwork version of the game didn’t have a box that visually “popped” and I think FlipOut has a “fresher” feeling to it.  The one thing I do miss?  The beautiful wooden cardholders – they made me drool.  But in the end, it’s always easier to convince friends to play a game in a pretty box.

FlipOut Stats:

• ~$20 Amazon.com, Fat Brain Toys, Barnes & Noble (starting in July) and some mom & pop retailers
• 2-5 player
• ~15 Minutes
• Ages 8 and up

Now because I don’t want this article to be one paragraph – it kind of doesn’t do the game justice – I’ll delve a little deeper into the game play.  The setup is simple, mix up the deck of cards (you can’t really shuffle them because they’re too stiff) and place them in a stack.  Take the top two cards and place them next to each other so nothing matches (neither color NOR object can match either horizontally, vertically or diagonally.)  These two cards start the playing area.  Next, one player will flip over 2 cards at the same time for the whole table to see.  Everyone looks and tries to find a place to play one of the two cards where they won’t create any matches.

You would think the “no match” thing would be pretty easy – but it’s amazing how many times you screw up!  So when you think you’ve found a spot you yell “WHOA!” (or more likely “I’ve got it!”) and show were the card goes.   If you’re correct, it stays there and you collect the other card and the player with the most cards at the end of the game wins.  If you were wrong, you’re out for the round AND you must discard one of your cards.  The game is over when you run out of cards in the draw deck.

Saddle Up! also has 2 other game variants in it, which are okay – but I really liked the “no match” game the best.  After a while it’s amazing that your brain actually feels like it’s getting a little workout. Since the game requires no reading, it’s good family fun.  Adult’s brains aren’t wasting away from sheer boredom (like some other children’s games) and kids have a chance of winning.   It also plays well with 2 players all the way up to a larger group (up to 6 players).

On the invention side of things, Saddle Up! is the brainchild of Germany’s Reinhard Staupe (I know that because his name is on the box).  But Reinhard has also invented other games with Playroom Entertainment (Sherlock, Trading Faces) and  games you may remember Blink (Out of the Box, Mattel) and Ricochet (Gamewright) in addition to many, MANY others.  Like most inventors, it took him a little while to break out into the business.  He invented his first game in 1989 but didn’t sign a licensing contract until 5 years later.  You can read a nice interview of him on The Dice Tower website (see HERE).  My favorite part was a question regarding the difference between German and American game markets and he says “As far as I’m concerned, the basic structures of the American and the German markets are the same: The more complex a game is the more difficult it is to sell.”  Duly noted.

Saddle Up! Stats:

• ~$8-10 Amazon.com, FunagainGames.com, and some mom & pop game stores
• 2-6 players
• 10-15 min.
• Ages 5 and up

To write about or not to write about – sometimes that’s the question.  Games come across my desk all the time and we play them and typically it’s love at first play or not so much (yet I still give them a second chance).  But once in a while there’s a game that didn’t go well in the first play but I have a feeling it was just with the wrong group of people.  You’ve Been Sentenced completely fits into that category.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this game, it’s all about creating a sentence out of the ten 5-sided cards in your hand.  Each side of the card has either a different word or phrase – they can be the same type of word (like a bunch of names or colors), a different form of a word (like: dream, dreamer, dreaming, dreams, dreamt), or a series of little words (like: and, of, the, to, a).  Each side of the card also has a point value ranging from 0 (wilds) to 20 points.  On each turn you get as much time as you want to concoct the highest scoring sentence possible (you don’t have to use all your cards).  Once someone thinks they’ve got a great sentence, they flip the timer and the countdown begins.  When time is up everyone reads their sentence – and some can be very absurd. For example:

Weird-O • George Washington • Secretly • Shaped • The Study • Of • Squeezing • Springy  • Squash.

If the group okays your creation, you total up your points adding a bonus of 10 points if you were the player to flip the timer and/or if you used all 10 cards in your hand.   The first player to 200 wins.

So what went wrong with the first play test?  I played with competitive people.  The sentences were a tad past absurd and there were far too many arguments on what should be allowed, which inhibited the game from being fun.  The second group was more laid back – maybe it was the wine – but the timer stopped but people still got a couple extra seconds to perfect their sentences because they were going to come up with the “best one yet” and no one really cared.  Players were striving to craft a sentence that was going to make the group laugh versus trying to win by putting together point-heavy arguably nonsensical string of words.  The other thing that I believe made a difference…having a tabletop.  The first group of players were strewn about out over a couch and chairs which makes it almost impossible to spread out your cards to see what you had.

Overall, You’ve Been Sentenced can be a great game if you’re playing with the RIGHT group of people – and potentially disastrous if you’re not.  So find some nice, friendly, non-competitive winos and gather around the table.  The game also has add-on decks so you can play with words that are more topic-specific such as: Pop Culture, Sports Highlights, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, the Reader’s Digest National Word Power Challenge (vocab) and out any day now NASA Space Terminology.  I personally enjoyed the Gourmet Cuisine deck because sauce, sauced, sausage, Big Boy and Colonel Sanders make for funny sentences.

You’ve Been Sentenced Stats:

• ~$25 for the main game, $8 for add on decks (you MUST have the main game to play!) at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, AreYouGame.com, and many others
• 3-10 players
• 30-45 min. (depends on how long it takes your players to perfect their sentences)
• Ages 8 and up

There’s something about those old school, hotel desk bells that is just awesome.  One of my all time favorite games – Pit – has that style bell.  The quick, frenzied game Halli Galli that I’m reviewing here also has that bell. Seriously, who can resist like a game that you have to hit a bell?!

I briefly mentioned Halli Galli in a holiday posting a couple years ago, but really the game deserves it’s own review.  But since I’ve already touched on it once, I’ll keep it short and sweet – kind of like the game!  Halli Galli is a simple to learn card game with, like I said, a bell in the middle.  Players keep a stack of cards with 1-5 pieces of fruit on them in front of them.  Everyone turns their cards over at the same time and if you see a total of EXACTLY five similar items on the table you ring the bell and collect the cards.  The player with the most cards wins and there are penalties for ringing in at the wrong time — like if there are too many or two few of one piece of fruit.

Halli Galli is a great game for tweens and kids because they have wickedly fast reflexes.  It’s been on the market since the early 1990s and has sold more than 2.5 million games worldwide but I think the odd-sounding name scares some people off.  Don’t let it!  And as a fun tidbit, rumor has it that it was originally called Tutti Frutti but then an erotic game show was launched with the same name so – for good reason – it got changed!

Halli Galli Stats:

• ~$16-20 at Amazon.com, AreYouGame.com, Barnes & Noble, and many more
• 2-6 players
• ~10-20 min.
• Ages 2-6 and up

I had never played it or even heard about it before I saw this picture – I bought it 100% based this photo…okay 90%, 10% was price point.  It was only a little over $12 so if it stunk, it wasn’t too much of my game budget out the window.  (Yes, I have a game budget otherwise I’d be very poor.)

Other than being visually cool with a Peter Max trippy look Aquarius is a pretty good game.  The goal is to get a chain of 7 panels of your particular pattern connected together. (In the pic at left, the fire has 4 in a row)  At the beginning of the game each player is given a goal card with their pattern on it but it’s good to keep in mind that goals may changed as the game progresses.  The game is all about building off a random “start card” and then you can build off any card in the mass by placing cards with matching panels next to each other.  As you can see, there can be multiple panels per card but you only have to match one – but if you match more than one you get a bonus.  There are also cards that allow you to move cards, remove cards, reshuffle everyone’s hands and trade or rotate goals, which keeps the game interesting.

Another thing I really liked about Aquarius is that it has amazingly written rules (click the image at right to see a larger image of page 1 of the instructions or you can download a full set HERE).  Not only do they GET TO THE POINT QUICKLY, there are color diagrams, they have visual cues for easy navigation and they keep the FAQs and alternative play stuff for the back page.  If you’re an inventor and need an example of well-written rules, spend the $12 and get yourself a copy.  I mean it…nothing irks me more than horrible directions.  They put me in a bad mood.

Aquarius Stats:

~$13 at Amazon, ToysRUs.com, AreYouGame.com, mom & pop retailers
2 to 4 players
~10-15 minutes
Ages 6 and Up

ChiTag was over more than a week ago, and I’ve yet to do a recap but it’s because I have to PLAY the games I found there before I review them to make sure I actually like them.  (duh)  This year there were TONS of games to play and buy at the open-to-the-public fair on Chicago’s Navy Pier and I covered a bunch of them in the preview article and I’ve also written articles about many of the games like Word on the Street, Triviathon, Blurt and Backseat Drawing.  But there were two new games that stood out when I made my rounds.

The first game embodies WHY to go to the fair.  The game is Eleminis and it’s the first game from a company called Smileypop.  The inventor, his family and friends were working the booth teaching people how to play the easy-to-learn card game and selling it to anyone interested in taking a copy home.  This kind of product is definitely going to be hard to find in stores and I often don’t review games with distribution as small as theirs because it’s too hard for you, my wonderful readers, to find and buy.  And it’s just mean for me to say “it’s awesome, but good luck finding one!”

In Eleminis the goal is to collect 5 different Elimini (Plant, Air, Water, Rock and Fire). Every player can have up to 5 cards in front of them at a time and on your turn you draw a card and place an Elemini in a blank space in front of you, or you can replace one of your own or one of your opponent’s Eleminis.   Each Elemini card can replace 2 other Eleminis and these icons are shown in the corner of the card.  This allows you to replace one of your own eleminis if you have a duplicate or you can make trouble for your opponents and create duplicates in their set of cards by replacing one of their eleminis.  In the deck there are also cards that allow you to move a card from one player to another, discard Eleminis and swap Eleminis which keeps things interesting.  Then there are there are Stars which are wild Eleminis and the black sheep of the family, the Trash which you need to remove from your hand before you win.  The game takes less than a minute to learn and plays well with 3-5 players (although I didn’t have a chance to test it with more than 5, I can say it wasn’t my fave with just 2 players.)

The other game I played A LOT at the fair is a game from a large manufacturer you may have heard of, Spin Master.  They got back into the world of games after buying some of Imagination Entertainment’s products and adding some new stuff to their portfolio including this new game called Stomple.  It’s very easy abstract strategy and the goal is to be the last player to have their Stomper on the board.  The board is a 7×7 grid of marbles and players use Stompers to push these different colored marbles through the holes the marbles sit in.  On your turn you push down or “stomp” a marble adjacent to your Stomper’s position on the board.  If there is a marble of the same color adjacent to the one you just stomped you must do that one too until there are no marbles of the same color next your stomper.  At anytime you may move to another part of the board by jumping to and stomping a marble that matches the color of your Stomper.  This is particularly useful when you find your Stomper with no marbles nearby since you MUST stomp a marble on each turn.  If you can’t stomp a marble on your turn you must remove you Stomper from the board and you’re done for the round.  But if your Stomper is the last one on the board you get 1 point for each marble left and 3 points for special red cat’s eye marbles.  You can play by counting rounds won or play to a certain total, either way it’s quick and very satisfying to stomp stuff!

Both of these games are quick to learn and play which makes them fun to play both at game fairs and at home.  And a quick thanks to Greg Zima, inventor of Stomple and Matt Laird, inventor of Eleminis for showing me their games at the fair!

Eleminis Stats:
~$11 at Amazon
2-8 Players (not great with 2 players)
~5-10 minutes per round
Ages 7 and Up

Stomple Stats:
~$30 at Amazon now and Barnes & Noble soon
2-4 Players
~5 minutes per round
Ages 8 and Up

Sometimes I think people are willing to cut games a little slack when they look really great but don’t play as well as they should.  Whereas I’m more likely to enjoy a game that is unattractive but that plays really well.  (What does that say about me?)   So when there is a good looking game that’s really fun to play I get downright excited!   (See my article on Pentago…I was drooling while playing that game!)  Anyway, Dweebies is just that kind of game.  I saw it at Gamewright’s booth at Toy Fair in February and have been dying to have a copy ever since.  The metal packaging is adorable but it’s the super cute Dweebies illustrations that I enjoy.  There are doctor Dweebies, yoga Dweebies, super Dweebies, foam-finger Dweebies and so on, and each one of them has been carefully illustrated for maximum cuteness!  (And yes, we name them as we play them!)

There are 54 Dweebies cards in the deck (27 different illustrations) and the goal is to collect as many of them as you can.  (And why wouldn’t you want to – they’re so CUTE!)  Players each starts with 5 cards in their hand and  replenishes as they play.  One by one players place Dweebies in a grid pattern in the center of the table by adding a Dweebie above, below or next to any other Dweebie.  To capture Dweebies you must create “bookends” of two of the same Dweebies and you collect all of the Dweebies in the middle.  Look at the the grainy illustration below  to get a better idea of what I mean by “bookends.”  Essentially, the two matching Dweebies must be on the ends.  Once you do this, you collect the two bookend Dweebies and any Dweebies in between them.

The other rule of the game is that apparently Dweebies don’t like to be lonely so if someone picks up a line of Dweebies and it creates some loner Dweebies or a couple of unconnected packs of Dweebies players must play cards to connect the Dweebies before adding cards elsewhere on the mass.  (Just FYI, the grainy image shows 2 game scenarios…I know that because someone couldn’t place a second bookend Dweebie until the two groups had been connected.)

It’s an easy overall concept for younger players to grasp, but there is another layer to this card game that makes it appealing to us older players as well.  Each Dweebie has a dot in the corner of the card.  This tells you how many of this particular Dweebie are in the deck.  The dots range from 1 to 4 and you’ll find that there is a strategy to playing the 1-dot “blocking” Dweebies and 4-dot Dweebies.   Obviously it’s very advantageous to count the cards, and it’s a great way to teach the younger crowd why card counting can be important in games.  Yep, that last sentence really solidifies it…. I’m a game geek.  But is that really wrong?

Dweebies Stats:
~$10 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, internet retailers and mom & pop game shops
2 to 6 (Never tested it with 5 or 6…sorry)
10 Minutes or less
Ages 8 and up

A friend of mine was over recently and asked if I could recommend a card game that’s “like UNO, but not UNO, but is easy for non-game people to get, like UNO — oh and it also has to be fun for two players.”  Huh.  So we headed up to my hallway of games and I started pulling products out for him to look at.  He really wanted something simple, fun and that takes 2 seconds to learn.  Something “familiar.”

The game that really resounded with him was Ratuki by USAOPOLY.  This game has been through testing several times and has made it to my list of games to review, but it kept getting pushed down the list because it almost felt “too familiar” in my opinion.  All of the play testers really enjoyed playing the game, but EVERY ONE of them said “it feels like another game I’ve played with just cards.”  And they’re right, it does BUT it has one neat and unique feature that makes it different and those are the cards themselves.  Instead of all of the cards being numbered in the same fashion, they have five different ways of writing the numbers 1-5.  They use pips on a die, roman numerals, the word, a hand and the standard number.  (see the image above)  This little change makes all the difference – and makes the game worth owning.

Ratuki is all about speed and each round ends when a player runs out of cards.  During a round, there is the potential of three stacks in the center of the play area and everyone can play on those three stacks.  Using the deck of cards in front of them, players build on the center stacks by playing a number one above or below the top card on the stack.  The goal is to get play a five and capture the stack.  At the end of the round, players count up the cards they captured, subtract any cards of their own they were left with and that’s their score.  Play by rounds or play to a certain number – it’s up to you!

The game is fast and frenzied, and to reset for a new round is a snap because players have their own color cards.  My friend and I played one quick round of the game and he really enjoyed it.  Like the other game testers, he thought the game had a familiar “feeling,” which was exactly what he was looking for, a “comfort food” kind of game.

Also, if you don’t have time to read the directions – check out the nice graphic explanation at www.playratuki.com.

Ratuki Stats:
$10-$15 at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Specialty Retailers
2-5 Players
3+ Minutes (totally depends on how many rounds you play or how many points you play up to)
Ages 7 and up