This review of Word on the Street is SERIOUSLY over due and it’s all because one of my favorite playtesters doesn’t like the game.  Why?  Because I always annihilate him when the two of us play.  Heh heh heh.  Seriously though, Word on the Street is a great game for word game geeks.  In fact, it just won a Mensa award this year!  (congrats!)

The game is essentially a “tug of war” with letters.  There are 17 consonant tiles placed in a line down the center of the board, which is the “median” of the street.  On a turn you flip a category card and have 30 seconds to think of a word within that category that includes consonant tiles still on the board.  (Vowels are freebies)  For each letter in your word, you move that consonant tile one space closer to your “curb.”  Once a tile is moved off the board it’s yours to keep.  The first team to collect eight tiles wins the game.  It’s really an easy concept to grasp after playing one round.  I even helped the wonderful folks at Out of the Box demo the game to a buyer during Toy Fair.

Also at Toy Fair got to have dinner with a bunch of brilliant inventors, including the inventor of Word on the Street, Jack Degnan.  He was nice enough to send me a photo of his prototype (always cool to see) and tell me how he came up with the game.  In his own words…

Word on the Street was a game idea I had about five years ago.  The original thought was for this to be a card game.  Players would turn over a category and try to use the letter-cards in their hand to try to spell a word that fit the category. It was a little tough and not quite as fun as I thought it would be…but I knew the concept had some potential.  About three years later I pulled it off the shelf and decided to make a board game out of it. The first version was pushing letters toward a finish line and then the idea of tug-of-war ACROSS the board rather than DOWN the board came to me. I wanted to call it Tug-of-Words, but the name was taken so I came up with the street idea. The rest is history.

In truth Jack’s just moonlighting as game inventor, his real job is working at a clinic for HIV research in San Diego.  So success couldn’t have come to a nicer guy.  And to sweeten the deal, this year Out of the Box has introduced a Junior version of the game.  It is a little bit smaller and includes vowels too.   I was a little worried about this at first — what happens when someone captures the E and the A?!  But it wasn’t really an issue (except when some snot played “FREEZER” – and this time it wasn’t me.)

Word on the Street Stats:
~$25 at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Borders
2-10 Players
20-30 Minutes
Ages 12 and up

Word on the Street JUNIOR Stats:
~$20 at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble
2-8 Players
20-30 Minutes (we omitted the use of the timer for this version game – too much pressure on the young ones)
Ages 8 and up

I know LOTS of people shy away from drawing games because often they think their drawings would be identical to that of a preschooler’s if instead of a marker they were using a bright green crayon.  I’ll admit it – I’m in that group.  I think I can hold my own pretty well but I avoid participating in any drawing contests if they include any of my designer friends.  I’m just not that great of an artist when it comes to sketching.

So then why would I give a good review (all reviews here are good reviews if you haven’t noticed) to a game with “drawing” in the title?  Because the person drawing isn’t really in control of what they’re doing so it can’t be their fault if it turns out looking like a four year old did it!

Backseat Drawing is a very simple game.  On each team there is an artist, a director and a bunch of guessers.  The director is the only one who knows what the word is and they instruct the artist what to draw.  They can only use words and phrases like circle, square, above, below, big, little, on an angle, etc.  So drawing something like a birdhouse isn’t that terrible whereas drawing a zipper can be outright hilarious since you can’t say something like “draw a pair of pants.”  All while the artist is drawing the artist and other teammates are guessing.  First team to guess correctly wins the round.

One of the inventors, Peggy Brown, is one of the funniest people in the toy industry and when I asked her how she came up with the idea for Backseat Drawing this is what she said:

“Backseat Drawing was invented in an Indian restaurant in Southport, Connecticut in the late 90s. While munching on nan bread and waiting for the mulligatawny soup to arrive, my buddy Catherine Rondeau and I began doodling on the backs of the paper placemats. Instead of, as many drawing games in the past have required, drawing things and getting the other player to guess what we were drawing, we decided to make the person who was doing the drawing have to guess what she, herself was drawing. That was it! A simple twist on a classic drawing game element was enough of a novel idea to make a really new and different, not to mention ridiculously silly and fun game. Because the player who gives the directions has absolutely no control of what gets drawn, we decided to call it Backseat Drawing. The name stuck, the simple play pattern and rules stuck, and that’s how Backseat Drawing was born. I can’t remember if we ordered the tandoori chicken, but I remember that as one of the most delicious meals I ever had!”

Amazing right?! All it took was a little bit of nan and Peggy and Catherine created this simple, but really fun game.  There is also a Junior version of the game out now, but I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t played the Junior version yet.  Still, I hear it’s doing well.

Backseat Drawing Stats:
~$20 at Target, Amazon.com
4-10 Players (the more the merrier)
~15-20 Minutes
Ages 6 and up

There’s just something addictive about throwing dice.  It’s the mixture of calculated odds and luck that makes you want to pick up a handful and get playing.  The best thing is there are lots of games beyond Yahtzee that are based around a handful – or cupful – of dice.  A good one is Easy Come, Easy Go.  It combines throwing four dice with collecting and stealing fantastic prize cards.  The game includes nine cards that can be earned (or stolen) by rolling a particular combination like “exactly 13” or “3 or less.”  And although rolling a “3 or less” sounds impossible when you’re playing with four dice, it’s not since the dice are numbered from 0-5 instead of the traditional 1-6.   What makes this game so great is that unlike Yahtzee where everyone is competing for a top score, you’re interacting with other players by stealing their cards so there’s quite a bit of competition and revenge.  It’s really a fun game to play with 3-4 other players.

Easy Come, Easy Go is the brainchild of the famous Reiner Knizia.  Haven’t heard of him?  Not many Americans outside of the game industry have.  He’s a very prolific game inventor who has licensed over 500 games so far.  So why then haven’t you heard of him?  Well, most of his titles are games that can only be found in Europe, but a couple have made their way to the United States via the Out of the Box game company which manufacturers Easy Come, Easy Go and also Reiner’s Fish Eat Fish and Tutankhamen.  Impressive, right?  I really want to know where he finds the time to invent so many games! (He probably doesn’t spend a chunk of time reviewing them – ha!)

Easy Come, Easy Go stats:

• ~$15, Amazon.com and online retailers
• 2-4 players (I think it’s best with 3-4)
• ~25-30 minutes (This maybe the biggest downfall of this game – it sometimes takes a little while for someone to win.)
• Ages 8 and up

Typically, all it takes to get a game lover interested in a new game is a glowing review from another game junkie – that’s it, they’re sold!  Earlier this year, I raved about Apples to Apples to my sister so she bought a copy and when it came time for her to buy a gift for my party game-loving aunt, she bought her a copy too.  Normally, I would expect excitement since this game was coming to her so highly recommended, but she didn’t seem excited.  Now, maybe it was the young sounding name or the bright red box that she didn’t immediately embrace, but we assured her it was a great game and awaited her review.

I love games and recommend a lot of games to friends and family, but it’s not like I’ve never met a game I didn’t like.  Sadly, I’ve come across far too many that I found painfully dull.  I give a pretty fair shake to any game that crosses my path; ones with weird names, dry themes, strange artwork – it’s all out there, but it’s the essence of the game that counts.  I have to WANT to play it – and once I’ve finished, I have to want to play it again.  And in that area, Apples to Apples gets very high marks.

So a couple months after Apples to Apples traveled from the Chicago birthday party back to my aunt’s home in Madison, I received a glowing review of the game in my inbox.  While I wondered why it had taken so long for her to play it, it was apparent it had immediately gained an important position on her game shelf.

For an adult with a circle of friends who love party games, I was astonished to hear that no one in the group had ever played it before.  For just about $25, it really is a party in a box – and a heavy box at that since the game is made up of pounds and pounds of cards.  Most of the cards are random words ranging from “Sunday Drivers” to “Angry Hornets” to “Televangelists” to “Loan Sharks” but a smaller number of cards are adjectives like “Industrious” and “Explosive.”

The game is simple: one player reads an adjective card like “Cuddly” and then players toss a word card from their hand that best fits the description into a pile.  Cards like “Napoleon Bonaparte,” “Meat Cleavers,” “Leeches” and “Firefighters” will be lobbed into the pile and then it’s up to the adjective reader to determine which card best fits the round’s adjective.  Personally, I don’t find meat cleavers cuddly at all, I wouldn’t want to cuddle with the diminutive military leader Napoleon Bonaparte and while leeches do cuddle up to you, my vote is still for firefighters since I’m dating one.

Part of the humor comes from the limited number of cards in your hand.  Because you’re only allowed five word cards at a time, you may have to decide whether to play “James Bond,” “Root Beer Floats” or “Stonehenge” for the adjective card “Legendary.”  Overall, it ends up being a hilarious mish mash of very literal to extremely funny interpretations of the adjective.  In the end, the winner is the player who has their word cards chosen the most times.

Forget strategy, calculating odds or an enormous lexicon, this game is easy for anyone to play – even those “non-game” friends.   And believe it or not, this game has been on the market long enough to sell over a million copies and proving that great games never die, Mattel just purchased it from the company that made it what it is today, Out of the Box games.  So this gem of a game will be on all mass market shelves for hopefully years to come, but definitely through this next holiday season.

And for all of you who want to know what took my aunt so long to play it – I asked – she said she was terrified by the number of cards.  Apparently, there was a bit of mental scarring after a five hour Trivial Pursuit marathon she experience just before she received the game.  Just goes to show you should never judge a game by its piece count!

Apples to Apples stats:

• ~$25 at any major retailer
• 4-10 players
• ~20-35 min. (depending on the number of players)
• Ages 12 and up (I say some smart 10 year olds can play too)