by Therese
I bought this game for my 8-year-old daughter to play with her father and I so we could have something fun, different, and engaging to do together after Christmas festivities settled down and we’d no doubt feel the post-holidays blues. So, we cracked the box open, smiling and anticipating “kicking butt” and having a great time challenging each other. I read through the instructions, then read through them again, then tried to dissect them into something that made a bit more sense. I passed them to my husband, hoping I was missing something obvious. It appears that the instructions are just vague and not very helpful. Eh, we figured we’d set up and see if we’d make sense of them as we started playing.
The gist of the game is that teams (in our case, girls versus boy) select challenge cards in 4 categories called Events (Luck, Smarts, Agility and Vision), and after a team wins 4 challenges (called mini games) in one event, they move onto the next until all 4 events are conquered by one team. Whomever wins an event earns the medal that corresponds to it. There are also some mini games that have a bonus medal you can earn (which are used as a tie-breaker should the event medals wind up in a deadlock).
We began with the Luck event and quickly realized that our excitement and anticipation would sink little by little into the deep end of boredom. A few of the “challenges” were simply guessing a number between 1 and 19, and if the number guessed landed on, say, a vowel, you win. Uh…we were waiting for the “and then…” but that was it. We basically have practiced that challenge a million times in our lives to settle whose turn it is to choose a movie or who gets the last chocolate pudding in the fridge.
After we painstakingly completed the Luck mini games, we moved to the Smarts event category. The fun fizzled out even more when the first card for drawn was a round of rock, paper, scissors. What? I bought a game to tell us to play a game we already play for free (and to see who gets the last chocolate pudding)? There were other mini games that I’d venture to say belonged in some category far, far away from one that implies needing intelligence to complete.
Okay, third and 4th events: Agility and Vision. This game had to have something worth the time we’d already invested in the game, right? No, that’s not a question from the Smarts event, though I would be lying if I said I didn’t expect it could be. These last 2 events were the least mind-numbing, but I still felt that we could have gotten “Minute to Win It” and had a million times more fun. One of the Agility mini games was a 30-second sit-up contest that, yes, we’ve maybe used to see who wins the last pudding. Agility is the ability to be quick and graceful. I beg you to envision a graceful sit-up contest. Even Joe Manganiello would struggle to pull that off (though it would be a decent thing to observe). The Vision event was less silly but still a letdown. One mini game had players study a maze with 4 different characters embedded on the card (the cards are 2.25 X 3.5 inches big) and after studying the puzzle for 30 seconds, there are questions asked about the maze.
I don’t recommend this game for many reasons, but on the top of my list of reasons is that you can manage to play (and probably already have) 95% of these mini games/challenges as a family without purchasing the game and probably have more fun, since the setting up and rules were more tedious than the game was worth. The positive (because I always try to find a silver lining in something) is that we spent some time together and now have a few new inside jokes. Inside jokes keep us as happy as winning a chocolate pudding. In that category, we all won.
If you’d like to take a look to see if you’d enjoy the game more, you can buy it here:
http://www.amazon.com/Spin-Master-Games-Parents-Challenge/dp/B00IGR5EQY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451953248&sr=8-1&keywords=family+challenge+board+game
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