Scrabble Electronic Catchphrase is a “refreshed” version of classic Catchphrase. The colors are different. The words and phrases that you try to get people to guess are new. But the game is the same wonderful party game it has always been.

We wrote about it 2002, and again in 2005. It was refreshed once more in 2010. And now again in 2012. It looks more refreshed now than. And what proves to be even more refreshing is that it’s the same game, and just as fun as it was 10 years ago when we first reviewed it – as follows (refreshed):

The game itself is readily understood because it is in fact a combination of hot potato and password. You try to get your team to guess the word or phrase on the LCD display (now backlit and easy to read). In the mean time, a timer is sounding. As soon as anybody on your team guesses correctly, you hand it off to the next player, who is on the other team. Meanwhile, the timer, the other player, and the other team are all getting more frantic. As soon as they guess it, they hand it off, etc., etc., et not much more cetera, because the timer isn’t very long, and when it goes off, if your team happen to be the one that’s holding it, the other team gets the point.

You have to press a button to tell the computer that the other team won (a good opportunity to manifest sportspersonlike behavior whilst massaging more salt into your conceptual wound). When the timer runs out, it buzzes two annoying times, rubbing in both victory and defeat. The next round begins with the selection of a new category, or not. And so it goes, until one team reaches 7 points. A brief musical fanfare proclaims the end of the game.

This game is most definitely fun. Way more fun than you think you could get out of an electronic gadget. The hot potato part adds tension and makes scoring feel very easy and natural. Because you don’t get points for guessing correctly (you just pass the pod to next player), the focus remains on the complete round of play rather than on a single correct guess. This makes the whole game even more fun. Because your team is working together to guess (yes, this is one of those more-the-merrier games that could easily accommodate twenty or even more players), there’s a wonderful sense of teamwork that transcends individual performance, again making the game even more fun. Being able to select a new category at the beginning of each round provides a good break, adds a bit of information, a sense of control, and is totally optional. And there are so many words and phrases (now 1500), and it’s all so elegantly designed that you don’t need to come up with variations to keep it fun, but, if you want to, there’s nothing stopping you. Younger kids might have difficulty with some of the vocabulary, but if you’re playing with a mixed age group, you don’t need to get so serious about the competition that you can’t find a way to make the game fun for everyone.

And now, from the makers of the Major Fun award-winning Anomia, we have Duple, a party game, using game play that is similar in many significant aspects to the aforementioned Major Fun award-winning Anomia, but different in a non-categorized, word-finding, vocabulary-searching kid of way – a difference of profound enough significance to make Duple a game that deserves its own review, as if it were an unprecedented invitation to fun, which, as a matter of fact, it is.

There are many cards.

Sixty-four of them are letter cards. Letter cards have, as you probably already conjectured, letters on them. One letter each. They also have symbols on them – one of eight different kinds. After you’ve set everything up and started actually playing, taking turns picking and turning over cards from the draw decks, the moment you notice that your card bears the same symbol as someone else’s card, you find yourself in a head-to-head race to be the first to utter, mention, or shout out a word of five or more letters that has both your letter and the letter on your opponent’s card. Thus catalyzing great attention-paying and moments of death and transfiguration.

But wait, there’s more. In addition to the letter cards, there are the category cards. Categorically speaking, this impact of these cards is to excruciate the intellect by forcing you not only to race to find a word of five or more letters containing both of the letters on the cards of matching symbol, but also restricting acceptability to words of that particular category. Also note, there are two kinds of category cards: thirteen have categories on them, and four cards don’t. These four are known as “blank” cards. Should you draw a blank card, you get to assert your strategic creativity and make your own category for that particular nonce, until another category card appears. There is also a category card that says “no category,” in which event there is as you would assume, no category at all, at all.

But wait again for the more: the wild cards. The wildness of these cards is indicated by each of them having a combination of two different symbols. No letters. No categories. No blankness. Just symbols. Two, as I said, different symbols. Thus, instead of looking for two letter cards with matching symbols, should you happen to notice that one of the symbols on a wild card is the same as that on your letter card, you must, with out further ado at all, seek out a player whose card bears the other symbol on the wild card – not the symbol that matches the symbol on your letter card, mind you. No, not at all that symbol.

And then there’s that particularly pernicious, and more than mildly exacerbating wild card bearing the words “All Play,” indicating that all players, not just those whose symbols match, must race to be the first to announce a word containing all the letters currently displayed.

There’s more. But the most more is the joyous intensity you will be experiencing, the constant engagement, the challenge, the, perhaps, yelling, the sheer Majorness of fun.

3-6 players, 10 or older. OK, maybe 7 if that guy absolutely has to play.

 

The eight stages of Kerflipping:

1) The Unboxing

You open the box. You take out the various and many intriguing components: the bag of 90 letter tiles (two-sided, ivory and yellow, some of which having little numbers on them), the lovely cloth drawstring tile bag, the four (yes, four) sand timers, the cute little deck of 22 bonus cards, the sturdy, yet empty, inner box for, what, holding the letter tiles? even though you already have a lovely cloth drawstring tile bag; the game board with the tuck-in-able flap; and the large, well-illustrated, cardstock rule thingy.

2) The Re-box

You read enough of the rules to realize that you should put the tiles in the tile bag (logically enough); and that strange, sturdy, yet empty inner box should have actually stayed in its special compartment; and that board with the tuck-in-able flap should go back on the box, on top of the strange, sturdy, yet empty inner box, with it’s flap, tucked in.

3) The wonder

You read a little further and find yourself pouring the letter tiles out of their lovely letter-tile bag, onto the flap-tucked game board, and then sweeping the tiles into the two compartments that yawn enticingly in their left and right compartments in front of the flap-tucked game board. And then you lift the box, and shake it so that the tiles slide rearwardly. And then you remove the gameboard only to discover that yes, as advertised, almost all of the tiles (you needed one more slight shake) have made their way to that inner box, which is now, at last, filled. And you remove that inner box and dump the tiles with consummate ease into the lovely letter-tile bag. And you are awash in wonder at the sheer cleverness of it all. And you do the whole thing again so that you can be similarly wonder-washed.

4) The play

And now, at last, box reassembled, tiles in their lovely drawstring bag, cute little bonus cards tucked snugly into their compartment, front and center; you find yourself stepping beyond the playing-with-the-game stage, ready, finally, to play the game itself actually. You and three of your anagram-loving, party-going friends each take three tiles from the tile bag, simultaneously place your tiles on top of the board in a random, ivory-face-up fashion, and then: let the game begin. As soon as you find it, call a word that can be spelled from some of the letters on the gameboard and start your timer. Now the remaining three get a bit more frantic, because they must find yet another word, hopefully a word that doesn’t use any of the letters that were in the first player’s word. (Well, you can use them if you need to, but they’re worth only half of the value of an unused letter.) And then the second player calls her word out, and starts her timer. If it happens that somehow in all this focused fury that the second player’s timer runs out before a third player has called out a word, the round, of course, reaches its untimely conclusion. And on and on, until everyone has found a word, or run out of time.

5) The score

The first player spells out his word, turning each tile in the word over as he announces each letter, and scoring 10 points for each. Should any of the tiles used in creating the word happen to also bear a number in their lower corner, the player also takes that many bonus cards, and keeps them, face-down, until stage 7:  the summing. The next player then spells out her word, scoring ten points for each ivory-side-up tile, but only 5 points for each of the tiles that are yellow-side up (having been turned thuswards by the first player).  And again, should a numbered letter tile be involved, collecting bonus cards accordingly. And so on, until the last player’s score has been recorded. And the on to stage 6.

6) The Replenishment

And so it goes, round after round, until there are not enough tiles left for the replenishment.

7) The Summing

The inevitable end of the game evits itself. Players add their totals from each round, arriving at a grander total. And then, for the moment of grace, look upon their bonus cards, adding their cumulative bonus to their cumulative scores and chortling variously. And, semi-finally, a discussion of strategies and feats of astounding cleverness and the fickleness of fate, and marveling again, perhaps, at the genius of it all: the box, the game, each other. Perhaps even noting how, in deed, given the tile-flip factor, a child as young as shall we say eight years could join the game, at somewhat of an equal advantage, should she be quick enough to shout out a word of as few as shall we say four as yet unused letters, and should we be inclined to invite her to join us some other time perhaps tomorrow.

8) The Replay

And so, without further ado, the game begins again, unless someone new wants to join, which will result in yet further ado.

Kerflip. Designed by Damon Tabb, available from Creative Foundry Gameworks, for 2-4 players, 8 and older.

There’s a game. A party game. An old party game called Fictionary. There’s another game. Plays like Fictionary. As challenging as Fictionary. At least as funny. Only, more elegantly designed. More intriguingly packaged. More portable. More, well, lovable. And it’s called Fictionaire.

Yes, it looks like a package of cigarettes. If you’re an anti-smoking kind of person, get over it. It’s a very clever little package. Very functional. Let me explain:

It’s a deck of cards. Sixty of the cards are for questions. There are questions on both sides of the cards. So you get 120 questions. There are also answers on the lower half of each card. But, notice, if you close the flap and tuck the question card the question card in as illustrated, you can’t see the answer. Very clever. If you could see the answer, you’d also notice that some of the words are in red (most of the time). There are also point cards and instruction cards. We’ll get to them later.

First, let me tell you about the exceptionally elegant part. You don’t need a dictionary. You don’t need paper and pencils. Everything you need is in that small, enticingly politically-incorrect, shirt-pocket-size box. You don’t even need pencil and paper to keep score. That’s what the point cards are for. There are 14 of them. You only need twice as many as there are players, because you only play two rounds.

So, one person reads the word in question on top of the first card in the pack (or any card, as long as the bottom stays hidden). For example, the questioner reads: “What is a Kiskeedee?”

Then the pack is passed to the next player. That player slides the card up so she can see the answer, which, in this case, is “A French-speaking person who us unable to understand English.” Notice the words in red. Since that player is the first to go, she can decide whether on not she wants to give the “real” answer. If she goes for reality, she must include the red words, her clue being something like “a French person who is unable to understand you,” or “what you might call someone who is French who, no matter how hard you try, seems unable to understand what you are saying.” The remaining players make up their own definitions, e.g.: “an affectionate person who likes to make nice to babies.”

Of course, the first player can always choose not to give the real answer – in many cases, a very wise choice, forcing someone else to have to deal with the truth – as long as someone does so before the round is over. The person who read the question (the “host”) then gives one point card to the person she thinks gave the correct answer. If he tricked the host, then that player also gets the question card. If not, the host gets it.

And on and on, until all the point cards are played, the player with the most point and/or question cards winning the game.

Elegant, don’t you think. Portable, party-worthy, pencil-and-paper-less fun.

There are four different, shall we say, packs, each extending the concept into a different area of knowledge: Classic (“What is a Vade Mecum?”), Naturals (“Harlequin ducks walk like a duck and quack like a….?”), Fool Science (“In the early 1900s phone operators were required to…”), Tall Tales (“When you enter a Mongolian Yurt it is customary to drink a glass of Kumis. What is it made of?”).

Designed by Hervé Marly, for people of smoking age, but not necessarily for smokers, available in the U.S. from Days of Wonder.