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.

Heximania

Heximania is a game that invites the whole family to a fun half-hour of strategic word play. Strategic word play. Family. These are ideas normally don't go together, but Heximania is simple enough for a first-grader to enjoy playing, and interesting enough to produce parental glee.

The game includes a collection of haxagonal letter tiles (thick, smooth, colorful) in a drawstring bag (well-made, with a locking closure), a hexagonal board (raised, 4x4x4x4x4x4 haxagonal grid, integrated turning base) 4 tile holders (plastic, ample), and a sand timer. The letter "A" is placed in the center of the board. Players each take 5 tiles from the tile bag and then take turns, adding one more letter to the board. The new letter must be adjacent to the last letter played. And it must make a word. When a letter is played, that player writes down all the words she can think of that begin with her letter, and can be formed from adjacent tiles. As the game progresses, a single tile placement can result in a surprising number of words. So surprising is the number of possible words that the player can easily miss one or several - especially with the pressure of having to complete the turn before the sand timer runs out. This adds significantly to the fun of it all, because the rest of the players can add to their score if they can find any words that were missed.

It reminds you of several good word games. Boggle®, Scrabble®, especially. But it's different. It's hexagonal, for one thing. For another, you build one letter at a time. For another, it's especially fun for kids, and just long enough to grab the collective attention span of the entire family.

Such&Such

Such&Such is a guessing game in which every question has two answers. As in: "In the Old Testament, Israel is referred to as the land of...." Two which you would answer Milk&Honey. Obviously. Or "Stars of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf." Hmmm. Elizabeth, obviously, Taylor, and Richard, of course, Burton. Or "Passive & active car passenger restraints." Would that be seat belts and air bags? Why most definitely it would.

You need two teams, so you'll want at least 4 people. But the more, potentially, the merrier. When it's your team's turn, you select one of the 250, double-sided cards, turn the timer over, and go through each of the five different clues while your team frantically attempts to answer each with the appropriate Such&Such.

Now, given all this pressure, it's only natural that your team might want to pass on one clue, or several, in the hopes of getting back to them with some new infusion of knowledge before the timer runs out. Whatever they don't get back to is given to the other team to guess.

One of our favorite parts of the game came from a wonderfully silly piece of rule-making. The manufacturers suggest that the team that is keeping time should "make a joyful noise" when the timer runs out. Well, we took it seriously, and some of our joyful noises resulted in significantly mirthful mayhem.

Everything works well in this game: the questions, for the most part, are entertaining and challenging as well as often surprising and subtle. The scoring device (write-on/wipe-off board and 5 pawns to indicate which questions are passed over) both effective and adequate. And the timer is 40 seconds when turned this way and that.

Not to mention the coupon for free pizza.