Innuendoes, free associations in new board games

With Christmas coming up, we here at ArtsEtc. were sent a few board games to play with to consider for the holiday gift guide we don’t write. We thought it would be fun to assign a not-quite-G-rated game play session to one of our writers. Below is what happened when we gave one writer two games and two weeks.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the chance to play a few new games from Patch. When I found out that Patch also distributes the Jeff Foxworthy-sponsored “You Might Be a Redneck if …” board game as well, I was a little skeptical. Unfortunately, my skepticism didn’t waver much.

First up was the game, “5 Second Rule.” It’s simple enough. The person to your right reads a category, and you have five seconds to list three things that fall under that category. However, the categories range from incredibly easy, such as colors, flowers and car brands, to incredibly challenging, like ACC, SEC or Big 12 Universities. You would think maybe there would be a color scheme, or some sort of pattern that would indicate easy categories versus hard, but there isn’t. Or at least there doesn’t seem to be.

The first time we tried to play through this game, we could only get about halfway around the circle before everyone lost interest. This isn’t a game you would want to play if your friends are distracted or have the TV on in the background.

A rule that I found major fault in is the “win by default” rule. Basically, when you can’t guess three things, the question gets passed to your left. The person to your left, however, cannot guess any of the things that you listed. This sometimes makes it very difficult for other people to come up with three things. Once the question makes it all the way around the circle, the first person it was asked to wins a point by default. Essentially, you could play the entire game with never getting a question right and still win.

The second time we played through it, it was much more enjoyable, which brings a little life back into the game. This time, there was a smaller, more focused group. Even so, interest was lost fairly shortly, as we resorted to sorting through the cards to pick out the impossible ones.

If you have an hour or so to kill and you have legitimately nothing else to do, this game may be beneficial for you; otherwise there are probably other options.

The second game I played was, “What’s Yours Like?” This game utilizes innuendos to get the person in the “Hot Seat” to guess the clue. For instance, if the clue was “My Car,” you might say, “Mine is dirty;” “Mine gets out a lot;” “Mine is hot.”

The person in the “Hot Seat” can ask as many players as he wants and guess as many times as he wants, but the more times he asks for hints, the more points he gets; the winner is the player with the least amount of points. The player who is very good at this game is the player who can block out the dirty answers their mind is leading them toward and think critically.

We actually had a blast playing this game through the first time. Sometimes, the answer was quite obvious. For example, the clue was “ears,” and the hint was, “Mine are not pierced.” That was guess pretty quickly. However, some clues could take quite a while before they were guessed. One in particular, “favorite TV show,” was never actually correctly guessed. On the first hint, “Mine is trashy,” the hint giver’s boyfriend was in the “Hot Seat” and replied with his answer, “face.” This went over well with the group.

The second time I played, this game had quite a different result. It was Thanksgiving with my family. Thankfully, they didn’t entirely understand the concept of the game, and it ended up becoming an awkward backward 20-question type game, where instead of relying on innuendos, they just described the item in question. One time, however, the clue was “bedroom,” and my mother responded with, “Hot,” to which my aunt whistled out in agreement. I’m still not quite sure in what way they meant that, but I’d rather not think about it. My family had great fun with this game, even if they did not play it how it was intended. But if you’re enjoying yourself, that’s all the really matters.

In the end, both games are not games that I would recommend to the avid board game player. However, if you have a focused group of individuals, some time to spare and some cash lying around that you’re not using (although the $25 could probably be used in a different way to entertain yourself on a weekend night), go out and pick up Patch’s “5 Second Rule” or “What’s Yours Like?”