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March 30, 2005

Games: Cranium

The other game we played last night was Cranium, the very popular modern party game sold at Starbucks and other mass-market chains. I had never played and was interested to give it a shot. The game is a team-based party game where clues are divided into four categories and each team sometimes has a choice of category and sometimes is forced into a particular one. The categories are 1) Trivia/General Knowledge 2) Word knowledge/Word Puzzles 3) Performance (charades/singing/humming) and 4) Creativity (drawing, clay sculpting). One thing that is different than most party games is that someone on a team that is bad at a particular thing like drawing never has to do it as, while the category is often forced upon the team, the person on the team doing the action is always a choice of the team. I could therefore avoid ever having to do the Performance clues which I am terrible at and focus on the Word clues. I actually thought the game was quite fun and a really nice mix of different types of questions/activities so you would never get bored of doing a particular activity as can happen in most party games. The only real negative I found was the randomness of the die-rolling movement system where in theory one team could have to answer something like 9 times as many questions as the other team. Realistically, this level of discrepancy would never happen but I don't think it that unlikely that a team, at least till they got into the final phase of the game, could have to answer twice as many questions as another team. The final phase, which I liked much better, is more like Trivial Pursuit where you have to answer one question in each of the four categories and then a final question in the category the other teams think will be hardest for you.

Recommended and because of the ability to choose which teammate performs which action, I think this game will go over well with a wider variety of people than pretty much any other party game I can think of, particularly if each team has 3 or more people. This allows one person to give and one to guess in a category where the third person on the team doesn't know a single thing about it (and of course that person will still be a guesser in case he surprises himself with an answer).

Posted by aarondf at March 30, 2005 05:07 PM

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Posted by: Serg at June 8, 2006 10:57 AM

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