Review: Chicks battle the Dudes
Publisher: University Games
Year: 2005
Tagline: A Face-off to see who is the smarter sex!

how we met

To my surprise, Bill brought this game home from a thrifting trip. We don’t play trivia games like this very often so we are generally all open to giving them a go as a nice light game. This one has a nice novelty in that it is a tug of war with shoelace ropes and everything. That’s worth a play through. Right?

how it plays

The game is boys against girls. Chicks sit on the chicks side of the board and dudes are on the dude side. The Chicks battle the Dudes token sits in the middle of the board to start, which puts the DUDES token and the CHICKS token in their respective START spaces.

From here teams take turns asking each other questions. Dudes draw from the chicks pile to ask the girls questions and Chicks draw from the dudes deck to ask the boys questions.

If a team answers correctly they give their rope a tug and move the token towards their side of the board. When a team starts on the final space on their side of the board then the opposing team draws from the CHALLENGE deck to ask the team a question.

CHALLENGE cards can include:

Who Makes Me? where the team reads a product name and the opposing team must give the brand or manufacturer from the card

Spell it where the opposing team spells a word

Finish the Phrase where the opposing team finishes an incomplete phrase

and Thumb Wrestling where each team chooses a champion

The first team to correctly make it to the end and pass a CHALLENGE question wins! And on behalf of their entire gender, presumably.

how it went

We played this at the end of a random game night. It was pretty much what you’d expect. Questions range from really simple to impossible. Many of them had multiple choice options and some inexplicably did not.

This is not the first gender-focused game that we have played. Certainly there are questions where the other team knew the answer clearly while one team struggled, and you could argue that most of these are more common knowledge for one gender than the other. Speaking in large brush strokes here, which I don’t usually do.

I don’t quite understand the illustrations on the board. I mean, I get that if we are more towards our end then we are relaxed and in a bubble bath because everything is going well. And I guess it kind of makes sense that it’s time to sweat and we get pushed to the wrong side of our START space, and that this stress could be represented by having to change a flat tire. But then why is the stressful picture on the boy side fixing a roof in the rain?

Putting people in boxing gloves on the cover was a weird move. How do you play tug of war in boxing gloves?

Bill was so convinced that the CHICKS deck had more multiple choice cards than the DUDES deck that he encouraged me to count them. Both decks have 90 cards, and it turns out he’s not wrong. The CHICKS deck had 76 cards with multiple choice questions on them while the DUDES deck had only 68. I probably have a margin of error of 5 or so – it wasn’t my most thorough work. But I still think that is relatively even. It is worth noting that the cards have three questions on them and we always read the top question, so that could have introduced additional imbalance.

For awhile it looked like the boys had the game in the bag, but we were able to turn it around. Ultimately Keri and I won! Although I think if the boys had chosen thumb wrestling for our challenge each time we might never have won.

play or pass

Pass. Nothing special here, this is just another boys vs girls game with a little added novelty component acknowledging that those games are basically a tug of war. We had fun, but this one is going back into the thrift cycle to light up another hour for someone sometime. The gift that keeps being given.