You know how to play Whisper Down the Lane? You may know it as Telephone or maybe Chinese Whispers or Operator or Grapevine or Gossip or Secret Message or The Messenger Game or Pass the Message. Yeah, that’s the one.
Now, imagine that instead of just playing it with words, you also played with sketches. And further imagine that you don’t use your voice (except to giggle maybe). And each player has a booklet. And each booklet is made up of those thick, glossy, write-on, wipe-off pages that you can write on and wipe off. And everybody writes and passes their booklet to the next player while receiving a booklet from the previous player, and writes what they think was drawn or draw what they think was written. And when you finally get the booklet that you started with, you discover how what you originally wrote got changed into something hilariously different. And you laugh and show everybody. And everybody takes turns, showing what happened to theirs. And sure there’s score and stuff, but it doesn’t matter at all at all because the whole point is the laughing and the semi-profound re-revelation of how far from the truth gossip can take you.
The only problem with Whisper Down the Lane and its many namesakes is that when people are very careful and very good with words, and in this case, very good with drawing, you sometimes end up having exactly the same thing you started out with, which is no fun at all at all.
Which is why we feel so positive about the Party version and having all those players, because it almost never happens that anybody gets anything, so to speak, right.
The manufacturers recommend the game for people at least twelve years old. Just like we found that with twelve players the game gets fun enough to be Major, we discovered that with younger kids, you’re more assured to get the crazy misinterpretations that make the game even Majorer, fun-wise.
From USAopoly, for 6 to 12 players (the more the merrier), recommended for people 12 and older (though we’d take anyone old enough to read and write).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8-XTMbszPk[/youtube]
