Shout About Movies

Shout About Movies 4 may not be the catchiest title in the world. But, if I know you, it'll probably be the highlight of you next party.

Now, before you get carried away to Amazon.com or your local retail outlet, let me help set an expectation or two. First, it's a consumable game. You can play it three times with the same group of people. And that's it. If you want to play it again, you're going to need a whole new group of people, none of whom has played it before. And that leaves you out. Unless you haven't played Shout About Movies 3, or Shout about Music or Shout About TV. And are willing to spend at least another $20.

In fact, the whole Shout About series is like that. Consumable. Which, in a way, is really quite innovational. In another way, the idea of a consumable game violates a very basic property of every other game we ever played. And I just don't like it one bit.

Except, it's really fun. It really works. The sheer entertainment of it all. The way the remote control is used and passed between teams. The score keeping. The variety. The timing and pace. It can keep a whole party-ful of people engaged for eight entire rounds per each of three games. With some snacks in between, you've got a whole evening's worth of significant and ultimately funny fun for everyone. Each round is different. Oh, it still deals with people's knowledge of movies or music or TV, depending on which of the series you've purchased, all right. But it's a different challenge. And each challenge gets people together, thinking hard, together, team vs. team, in intense, multi-media, animated, competition about knowing really trivial things.

Unless you happen not to know anything at all about, say, music of the 90s. Which explains why the games tend to be even more fun as the crowd gets larger. I and my wife, for example, and a goodly collection fellow Tasters, each of whom was at least 20 years newer to the world than we, tried one of the Music games. While everyone else was clearly having fun, loving the challenge of it, genuinely, but playfully engaged in trying to remember things first, we found ourselves wandering off to the refrigerator and getting snacks ready.

So there you have it. A consumable game, for goodness sake. Major FUN. By a unanimous decision.