Shake ‘n Take

03/09/201112/19/2011 - Will Bain Leave a comment

Shake ‘n Take is a wonderfully silly game about aliens that gets a lot of laughs and a lot of tension out of a very simple action. At its heart, Shake ‘n Take is a race to see who can circle all the items on a plastic card. Throw in a few complications and before you can say Na-Nu Na-Nu everyone is preparing to pounce on the person with the dry-erase marker that looks like it escaped from Area 51.

Dry erase technology has been under-utilized in the game industry. Now, maybe there are sound, environmentally conscientious reasons why dry erase markers are used less than paper and golf-pencils when it comes to score keeping, doodling, and lists. Maybe. But it just seems to me like a tremendous waste when games include pads of paper and columns of wooden pencils that are destined to be used once and then thrown away (you know you throw those pencils away the first chance you get). Dry erase as an oeuvre has its limits but many games could be adapted very well to a single white-board and a few markers. I’m just sayin’.

Shake ‘n Take puts the technology to great use and it is so fun that you hardly realize how intoxicating the fumes from the markers can be in an enclosed room. Out of the Box Games has also employed dry-erase markers in their party-game Backseat Drawing. That game requires players to follow directions and draw simple shapes. Shake n Take only requires that players can make circles.

Here’s what you get with the game: 2 markers; 2 marker holders in the shape of long green aliens; 10 large plastic cards decorated with an array of 70 small aliens; 2 dice; 2 alien shakers; 2 erasers. Each player gets one of the cards. In games of 5 or fewer players, only one marker (in its alien holder) one shaker and one die are used. In games of 6 or more, both of the markers, shakers, and dice are utilized.

The goal: circle all 70 aliens on your card. Each alien must be circled individually. It’s crowded on the card so be careful—a circle around one alien may not touch another. The aliens come in 5 distinct shapes (circle, square, star, heart and triangle). This matches the shapes on the die. Roll the die and start circling aliens of that shape. You may re-roll at any time. While you are circling, the person to your right is frantically rattling the alien shaker. This is a clear plastic egg with a green die in it. One side of the shaker die has the picture of an alien. When the alien comes up, that player snatches the dry erase pen out of your hand, rolls the shape die, and starts circling aliens.

That’s right. Snatches the pen from your hand. Nothing polite. Nothing subtle. You don’t even get to finish circling an alien. ZZWOOOP!! Like when the mother-ship tractor beamed you out of your bed for a round of hide the probe.

The game is loud and fast and you leave with lots of marker streaks on your hands, but phone home is it fun. With six people we had 2 markers and shakers going at once. There is very little down-time and those who aren’t circling aliens or obsessively agitating the shaker are making a huge racket to distract those who are. Snatching the marker is great: incredibly satisfying and frustrating all at the same time.

Another interesting feature regards the plastic cards. They are reversible. On one side, there are aliens that closely resemble the five basic shapes. On the reverse side, there are simply shapes. This allows for a wider range of players as younger children won’t find the cartoonish alien shapes so distracting. Even with older, more experienced players, the side with the simple geometric shapes was plenty challenging and plenty of fun. Major Fun– regardless of your planet of origin.

Reverse Charades

01/31/201112/19/2011 - Bernie DeKoven Leave a comment

See, in your traditional, non-reverse charades, one person is trying to get her team to guess a word, a phrase, a book, song or movie title – except she can’t talk; while her team is guessing everything they can think of that is remotely connected to the frantic gestures of their team mate. So, logically, Reverse Charades is just like charades, except that it’s the team that’s frantically gesturing to one of their team members, who is guessing with equal franticity.

So, you ask, is that fun enough to deserve being a whole new game? Our answer, without further qualifications or conceptual gesticulations: you bet it is! Observe the following for further self-evidence.

As you can see, the team is trying to get its representative to guess as many words as possible within the 60-second time limit. As you might also note, there are children in the team, and they are using the soon-to-be released iPhone app. This demonstrates two more key aspects of the game – it is such an elegant, easy-to-understand concept for anyone who knows charades (like, for example, you) that it lends itself to just about any group; and that the rules, as elegantly as they are written, are meant to be change – whatever the size of the group, or the time they want to give each other per turn, or whatever else they want to do to make the game fun.

When we first tasted it, we didn’t have the recommended minimum number of players. We only had 4 people, and the game recommends a minimum of 6, 3 players for each team. So we changed the rules. We didn’t have teams. Three people did the charading, one the guessing. Next round, we just changed the guesser. If we would have kept score, we would have given ourselves points for all the words we managed to get, each round, hoping each time to beat our record. And the fun actually abounded.

Reverse Charades demonstrates the kind of reversal that we most like to see in games. In your traditional, non-reverse charades, one player has to do all the performing, all alone. This puts anyone even remotely shy or self-conscious in a potentially embarrassing position, and, sadly, some people find that person’s discomfort emblematic of the fun of non-reverse charades. In Reverse Charades, no one is embarrassed, because everyone is acting silly together. And yes, there is a certain chaos. And yes, it’s the very kind of chaos makes the fun major.

Game design by Bryce and Scott Porter, with artistic design by Dave Regnier, the most recent edition of Reverse Charades comes with 288, double-sided word cards, a 60-second sand timer, and very simple, inviting instructions. A new edition with many sets of themed card packs (sports cards, 80s, junior editions, movie, holidays) all in the works. The game app for Android, iPhone and iPad will be released in med-February, with lite-versions for free so people can taste the games themselves before they leap into the joyous fray.

Ligretto

01/25/201112/19/2011 - Bernie DeKoven Leave a comment

Some might say that the Major Fun award-winning Dutch Blitz is actually a variation of Ligretto, others might claim Ligretto is yet a variation of Spit, and/or Speed, and perhaps even of Nertz (a.k.a. Stits, Nerts, Nerks, Dooker, Canfield, Crunch, Nirts, Nerf, Gluck, “Blitz”, Maxcards, Peanuts, Popeye, Pounce, Snerds, Solitaire Frenzy, Scrub, Stop, Squeal, Squeak, Squid, Squinch, Lapu-Lapu Dirty Dance, Swish, Racing Demons, Race Horse Rummy, Lucky Thirty, Grouch, Hell, Hallelujah, Hoorah, Mertz, Moofles, Flip Flip, Knertz, Nuts, Nutz, Nutsy, Kitz Nitz, Double Dutch Bus, Snatch, and Nerds). But all will find many hours of undeniable fun in the knowledge that Ligretto is the only of the aforementioned that can be played with as many as 12 players (providing you’ve purchased each of the three different sets – red, blue and green).

Having play-tasted all of the aforementioned, we find that the 12-player potential of Ligretto merits its own Major Fun award.

The object of Ligretto is to be the first player to get rid of your stock. Stock? That’s actually a solitaire term for the cards you place on the table and are trying to play. Which makes a lot of sense, insofar as Ligretto is very much like a solitaire game you play with other people. In Ligretto, the stock consists of a stack, actually, of 10 cards, face down. Then you place 4 cards in a row, face-up, next to the stack. The rest of your cards remain in your hand. If any of the cards in your row is a One, you can immediately play it to the table, and use one card from your stock to replace it. If any player has already played a One, and you have a Two of the same suit, you can play your two onto that player’s One. And so on, and so on, with evermore passionate intensity, until someone, having exhausted all her stock, screams “Ligretto” (best when the “r” of Ligrrrretto is rolled victoriously).

Sure, it gets chaotic enough playing your basic 4-person game. But with 12, you reach a level of exacerbated frenzy that transcends reason. So many cards on the table, so much to look at, the possibilities, the likelihood that someone else will find the very card for which you are so desperately seeking, and so deservedly deserve… it’s a conceptually quantum shift, is what it is. And fun? O, yes and most certainly major.

Dutch Blitz

12/13/201012/19/2011 - Will Bain Leave a comment

Growing up, it was good being the eldest child. My sister, 19 months my junior, worked hard to keep up. My parents have this distinct memory, one that seems to have epitomized our sibling bond, of my sister gripping the step-plate of a tricycle as I drug her all over the yard in an attempt to shake her loose. It was like a scene out of an Indiana Jones movie (one of the good ones…) To say we were competitive would be an understatement, but I liked that in my sister. She put up a good fight, and so I could feel good about winning. And I always won.

That was until Dutch Blitz.

Dutch Blitz is a card game. A speed card game in which players have a deck of 40 cards: four suits (blue, yellow, red, green) numbered 1 – 10. The game was developed in Pennsylvania Dutch country by Werner Ernst George Muller in the late 1950s. It is especially popular in northern states that have extensive German, Dutch, and Amish communities.

Blitz (German for lightning) is the operative word. Each player has a “Blitz” pile of 10 cards. The goal is to get rid of these 10 cards by playing them on piles of cards that sprout up in the middle of the table. Players may start a pile in the middle of the table, the “Dutch” piles, with the number 1. Once a “Dutch” pile is started, the other players may play their cards sequentially on that pile (2 goes on a 1, 3 goes on a 2, etc…) It is important to remember that the goal is to get rid of the “Blitz” pile. The first player to play all the cards of this “Blitz” pile shouts BLITZ!! and the round stops. The other players count up how many cards are left in their Blitz pile and multiply by two. These are negative points. Cards played to the Dutch piles are sorted (each deck has a different picture on the back) and counted. These are positive points. Each round is scored and the game ends when a player reaches 100 points.

The game is incredibly fast and is one of those games that should come with a stroke warning for people with blood pressure related illnesses. Because the Dutch piles in the middle are shared, collisions are common as players desperately try to move cards from their Blitz pile or just get out a few more points. This is not a game for leisurely conversation. At family reunions and holiday gatherings the most common phrase during play is “Can’t talk. Go ask your (insert other parent here)”

Blue and Yellow cards have an image of a boy while in the upper corners while the Red and Green cards have the image of a girl. This allows for a further complication of the game as players can also play cards on three piles in front of them (like Solitaire) as long as they alternate boy and girl cards.

When the Major Fun tasters played the game, I sat out many of the rounds. Experience is a definite advantage in speed games, and sure enough, when I finally played a few hands I won easily. But the others learned quickly and once the learning curve smoothed out, we had several tense, exciting rounds. Brought back memories.

My sister destroyed me in Dutch Blitz. I might win a round or two but she would dominate the game. I never wanted to give up—I remained competitive—but I can’t remember many times in which I got to 100 before my sister. A humbling moment in the sibling dynamic. But Major Fun for nearly four decades.

William Bain, Games Taster

Although you cannot buy Dutch Blitz from the parent website, the company does provide a list of distributors that will sell via the inter-tubes. Their list of online distributors is here: http://www.dutchblitz.com/webdistributors.htm