Tis the season! More posts are going up because more gaming is going on, and I imagine many will continue to be "bonus" posts, in other words posts about games that are not on OUR shelves. This is a new game of my brother's, and the boys brought it to our house today. They'd had a good time playing it recently and wanted to share it with us. I have to agree that it is fun. My take on it is that it's the hardest word game ever combined with the easiest Dungeons & Dragons campaign ever. Actually, the game isn't hard at all, what is hard is trying to come up with effective words as "traps" for the other team and trying to guess your team's word while avoiding their traps. OK, that probably makes no sense. I think I'm having a hard time writing simply because I just finished playing and so have spent a lot of time describing a word while trying to imagine (and not say) words the other team might think I will say while trying to describe this word.
Basically, you are trying to make your way through a dungeon by guessing the word your teammate is describing. The other team has written a list of words that are "traps" -- meaning if the person describing the word says a word on the list your team has fallen into a trap. As you succeed in guessing words you move up the tiles (i.e. through the dungeon). Notice that the number on the tiles increase by one as you move forward. That number is the amount of trap words your opponents will be writing for you, so the further you go the harder it gets. This also keeps things balanced, as the team that is behind always has fewer traps to avoid.
The words above were trap words for a team trying to guess the word "ant." The words below were traps for a team trying to guess the word "fiancé." On the card below you see two words on the even-numbered spaces. That's because the team trying to guess the word was at the end of the dungeon and, thus, facing the monster. It's hard to fight a monster, so this is how the game got harder for that team.
There are other things that make it harder to balance things out as well. If you look at the second picture on this post you'll see cards off to the side of the dungeon. These are traps as well, and the first team that lands on that square has to "disarm" (i.e. deal with) that trap. Once they have done so the trap remains disarmed, and the team coming behind them doesn't have to deal with it. Some of the traps are shown below.
There are, of course, lots of word cards, and there are "books" for them to be slid into so that just one word is showing. That's the word the one team comes up with trapwords for; the book is then passed over to the describer on the other team.
I think the difficulty level of the game depends a lot on who is playing it. We play a lot of word games, and we've watched a lot of movies and shows together (which we quote to each other), and we're readers, and we like word play and punning in general. This makes is hard for us to out-think each other in this sort of situation. We all know that someone might say "horticulturalist" in describing the word "gardener" or that someone might say "mandible" for the word "jaw," so we end up selecting trapwords like that, but then we might end up overthinking it and leaving an opening for the other team to just use simple words, so then we rethink our choices, and then . . . Anyway, by the time we got done I could barely think or speak because all words, simple or difficult, felt like traps, and I felt completely tongue-tied! It was a ton of fun nevertheless! (I think Jacob got me to say "sloth" by giving the description "lackadaisical quadruped branch" or something like that.)
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