Idle Remorse

Review: Real People

By On April 14, 2021 With No Comments

Review: Real People
Publisher: Parker Brothers
Year: 1991
Players: 3 to 6 teams or players
Tagline: The Game Where Looks Can Be Very Deceiving!

The phrase Real People over a gathering of different people in diverse dress

how we met

Real People is my favorite type of thrift game find. The cover is amazing, I have never heard of it before, the price is right and the gameplay looks bizarre. It contains a bunch of photos and is a snapshot in time. I never knew I wanted Real People until I laid eyes on it for the first time. And then I was a real happy person.

how it plays

Players should decide in advance how many rounds they want to play, but this should be even for each player or team. The player or team with the most points at the end of the game wins Real People!

Players take turns being the Leader of a given round. When you are the Leader, you randomly choose four Face Cards (from the stack of 400!) and place them face-out into the plastic tray. Leaders should avoid looking at the card faces. This leaves the Leader with a list of ten facts about each of the people facing the other players. The Leader chooses one of these to read from for the rest of the round.

A photo showing four headshots
So here is a real world example from our play. May I introduce you to these real people, or at least their faces?
The accompanying list of facts for each of the people in the previous photo
Here are the list of facts to give you an idea of what to expect. The first fact card ties to first photo above, and onward respectively

To begin, the Leader chooses one fact to reveal about the person they chose. Next, players can take turns asking questions or decide together which question to ask next. But it’s important to take your time because you need to track the scoresheet as you go along.

Here is a look at the scoresheet, showing how you track and score

The faster you can guess the real person, the more points you will get. So if you think you know for certain it’s person B then turn over your scoresheet and wait out the rest of the round until other players are ready to guess. If you are correct after 3 questions you get 8 points. A player that also guessed B but waited for 6 questions would only receive 5 points.

A female cab driver with a nickname of Rocky
But do be careful. This card and her facts might throw your assumptions for a loop!

The Leader then slowly and dramatically pulls out the other people from the tray one by one until only the right person is left. Players then total their points for the round and the next round begins!

After all the rounds end, add up your total scores to find the winner of Real People!

how it went

Not only was I lucky enough to find Real People at thrift for a couple of bucks, but the cards were sealed and the stickers had yet to be placed! What a great score. No boogers on any photos, no weird smells, no dried old rubber bands.

Me holding sealed cards from the game
This is the dream. Also can we get a round of applause for this person that mentally dissolved a tumor?

The game encourages you to use careful eye movement and some amount of faking it to respond to questions so it’s unclear which card you are reading. But sometimes the facts are bizarre or even a couple of sentences long so we ended up hooding our eyes with a piece of paper instead. I think an even better approach would be to have the Leader take a photo of each card back and then privately choose which they will read. Then they are not looking at the cards at all and that loophole is closed.

Foreground is the four headshots and background is someone holding paper over their face to look at back of cards
Our paper eye cover at work

The obvious lesson of Real People is not to judge a book by its cover…while ultimately requiring you to do so. There are certainly facts about people that your bias may direct to another person based on only their photo. And there are facts that seem so obvious based on the same bias and you can really lock in your answer early. So it’s the luck of the draw I guess.

You may walk away having been mildly surprised at some of the results of who tied to which fact. But I really don’t think you will be shocked, and if you are then you should keep playing over and over until you are no longer shocked. It should never shock you that people can be surprising. And if you have a boring round? People can be really unsurprising too. No shocker there.

Bill thinks the game is fake and rigged and he may be onto something because he won Real People!

play or pass

Play. Some of these people will surprise you. Some will not surprise you. So, real people indeed. But Real People is built on a foundation that I agree with: people are interesting. In this day and age you can leverage technology to hear stories from around the globe or even people on the street in your city. But if you want a flashback to 1991, Real People might be just the thing.

Review: Guinness game of world records

By On April 10, 2021 With No Comments

Review: Guinness game of world records
Publisher: Parker Brothers
Year: 1975
Players: 2 to 6
Tagline: Set your own Home Records in the fun-packed HOTTEST MOSTEST GREATEST LONGEST STRONGEST EVENTS

how we met

I have often seen this one in the wild, in all sorts of wilds really. I have seen it for high prices at flea markets, for astronomical prices at antique stores, and for more reasonable prices at thrift. Finally one day I found it for just $1 and decided to pull the trigger.

When I was in elementary school I would occasionally check out the The Guinness Book of World Records books from the library and flip through them admiring the tallest, shortest, heaviest, thinnest, longest neck, fastest, and whatnot people in the whole world. The books felt like such a strange celebration and I enjoyed taking part in it. So I think I was always going to buy the game to check it out. I was just waiting for the right copy.

how it plays

Players gain points by participating in events, breaking records, answering trivia, etc. The first player to participate in all five events and earn 100 points wins Guinness game of world records!

The board has the same visual charm as the cover

Guinness game of world records is a roll and move game where player pawns start in the starting space. Roll the die and move clockwise to determine which event you will participate in. There are several different possibilities. The first is just trivia.

  • Guinness Question: the player to your left chooses a question (hopefully randomly and not spitefully, the rules don’t say) from the booklet and reads it aloud to you. If you answer correctly, you get 10 points! If you are incorrect, a chip is placed on the space awarding 5 additional points to the next person to land in that space and answer another question correctly.
A few examples of the trivia questions. All answers are at the back of the book.

There are multiple events that you can land on, and each has a Challenge #1 and Challenge #2 that are slightly different. The instructions recommend that the group chooses #1 or #2 and everyone sticks to those challenges throughout the game. I suppose this is meant to make the game feel fresh and new if you play again.

Here is a quick look at the different competitions:

  • Longest 1: See how many consecutive times you can roll two dice without rolling doubles and take 1 point for each successful round.
  • Longest 2: Before you roll a die call out odd or even and continue to do so until you are wrong. Take 1 point for each successful round.
  • Strongest 1: Touching only the two on the end, lift 5 weights to shoulder height and down to the table again without any dropping. If you are successful add one weight to each end. Take 1 point for each weight you are able to lift without dropping in your final successful round.
  • Strongest 2: Stack weights on top of each other until they fall. Take 1 point for each stacked weight prior to the one that made them fall.
  • Mostest 1: Bounce a ball into a cup. You get 5 balls so 5 tries but can continue if your last ball goes in until you fail. Take 1 point for your longest run of successful balls in the cup.
  • Mostest 2: Use a large disk to push a smaller disk into the hole. You can try this 5 times but can continue if your 5th is successful until you fail. Take 2 points for each disk consecutively shot into the hole.
  • Greatest 1: Tiddlywinks! See how many disks you can land in the cup. Similar to other events you have 5 tries but can continue if the 5th is successful. Take 1 point for your longest run of consecutive disks landing in the cup.
  • Greatest 2: Drop disks from waist level into the cup on the floor. Again, 5 tries and take 1 point for your longest run of consecutive disks landing in the cup.
  • Hottest 1: Flip a ball in the air using the Distance Card, flipping the card fully over each time you flip the ball. Score 1 point for each successful flip-and-land combo.
  • Hottest 2: Place the ball in the cup and flip it onto the table and catch it in the cup again. Then repeat until you do not catch the ball. Take 1 point for each successful catch.
Here are the components plopped into the cup

Other spaces on the board let you challenge players or try to set records. The book includes a place to enter highest records.

The first player to 100 points wins Guinness game of world records!

how it went

Bill and I tackled Guinness game of world records last summer on some random evening.

I think one could argue that a lot of the trivia is probably outdated by now, and it maybe is. Maybe lobsters are bigger these days. But every single trivia question is multiple choice, so I don’t think this is the drawback that it could otherwise be.

Guinness game of world records does a neat job of making a variety of challenges using a minimal amount of pieces. The Distance Card, for example, is used in different, clever ways. However I think it’s a mistake to focus on either doing the #1 challenges or the #2 challenges in a single game. The road to 100 points is long, and I didn’t feel like we had enough variety. We were getting sick of the same challenges over and over. But, you know, a simple house rule solves that.

This card has instructions for various challenges on both sides of it. According to BGG comments some players perfect the ball bouncing challenge and can win the game in one turn!

I was rubbish at bouncing a ball into a cup. I was terrible at flipping a ball into the air and bouncing it on cardboard. I liked the dice challenge best (for us this was rolling until you roll doubles) because it is simple and because Lady Luck has always been kind to me. The weight challenge was okay and generally good for 7 points when you can do it. And this was my first introduction to tiddlywinks. I was not very good at landing my disk into the pot this way either, but it was very fun to try.

This is what the “weights” look like for the Strongest #1 challenge, where you must lift these to shoulder height and safely back down again only touching the weights on each end. Five weights is the minimum and you can attempt to go up to 20. Our best was 9.

I was consistently behind in these challenges and Bill won Guinness game of world records!

This was an action shot where the disk ended up flying distantly past the cup. Pro tip: set up a barrier for this and the small balls

I mentioned that one of the reasons I was intrigued by this game was growing up looking through versions of The Guinness Book of World Records. I remember the records as so extreme. This would be a tough note to achieve with a thematic board game, and I really don’t think Guinness game of world records pulled off its theme. The trivia touches on a variety of records, but the mini games are just mixtures of luck and dexterity.

I can think of multiple other ideas for events that would not require more pieces or minimal pieces and would tap into different types of talent. Balance on one foot, say the alphabet backwards within a time limit, juggle kleenex, who can get their disk the furthest distance, who can hold their breath the longest, etc. I know less is more and the designers likely don’t want to junk up the game with too many events. But they did need more variety.

play or pass

Neat, novel idea but pass. Thematically this game felt more like a decathlon than a Guinness game of world records; it really leaves behind the strange and bizarre records that haunt so many pages of The Guinness Book of World Records. Dice chucking and tiddlywinks can be fun, but even my favorite mini games did not feel HOTTEST, MOSTEST, GREATEST, LONGEST or STRONGEST. This was a mediocre attempt and we had an okay time.

Review: Polly Pocket

By On April 7, 2021 With 2 Comments

Review: Polly Pocket
Publisher: RoseArt
Year: 1994
Players: 2 to 4
Tagline: Party Game

Cover shows cartoon Polly Pockets standing on some grass looking happy

how we met

I found Polly Pocket at a thrift shop that rarely disappoints. The store is nearly an hour away, so I don’t get there very often; usually we only travel there when we need something for the sheep that is not available closer to home. And this shop usually only has eight to ten games at a given time. But more often than not, a single one of those games is pure gold. And one fateful day that golden game was Polly Pocket.

I am a bit too old to have enjoyed Polly Pocket dolls when they hit the shelves in the U.S., but I was very willing to pay $1.99 to see how this doll line was interpreted into a board game. And the cuteness felt guaranteed!

how it plays

Polly Pocket is a roll and move, pick up and deliver game where your object is to get invitations to parties, buy presents for the kiddos, obtain a balloon from each party and land back on your home space by exact count. Then you win Polly Pocket!

On their turn players roll the die and move that number of spaces (any direction but no changing direction in the turn). If they roll the envelope they can draw from the Invitation pile to get a party invite yay! If they don’t want an invite, like later in the game, they can move one space.

Overview of the board
Here we are setting up and almost ready for play

Once a Polly Pocket has a party invitation they can stop at the gift shop (does not need to be exact count to stop) and grab a gift in the color of their vehicle. Then they will race to the closest party they have an invitation for – and have not visited yet – and trade the gift for a balloon. They are able to leave the party at their next turn and continue the quest for four different colored balloons, one from each party.

Spaces on the board with purple hearts allow a Polly Pocket landing there to draw a Lucky Card. These can allow you to draw Invitations, steal Invitations, Move additional spaces, things like that.

Example lucky cards let you move or draw invitations or take a gift, etc
A few of the Lucky Cards

If a Polly Pocket tries to get an invitation but fails over two turns then they are able to draw one from the top of the pile – which still might be the wrong one so…

The invitations include a picture of the girl and say Invitation to Midge's Party, for example
A couple of the Invitations

The first Polly Pocket to collect all four different balloons and return to their home space wins Polly Pocket!

how it went

I was pretty excited to find Polly Pocket for a couple bucks. It has soooo many little pieces. It turns out that my copy was missing 3 balloons, 2 gifts and one house partition. None of this impacted gameplay. The game comes with extra pieces so if you are only playing with four players then you will have more pieces than you need. That’s important if you are looking to purchase a copy that is incomplete.

A shot of our play

However there are only four vehicles and four Polly Pockets, which are exclusive to the game!

The Polly Pockets are just taller than a penny
Gross old penny for scale

FUN FACT: While I feel like Polly Pockets were more popular with people slightly younger than me, I did have a few Sweet Secrets when I was young and I loved em. I would go nuts over a Sweet Secrets game and keep it forever.

Polly Pocket is adorable and really fun to take pictures of. It did not disappoint on the cuteness factor. It probably goes without saying that I appreciated not having to land by exact count when stopping at the gift shop or stopping by a party for a balloon.

A bunch of Polly Pockets waiting to join a party
Here’s a few Polly Pockets lined up to party

The biggest problem with Polly Pocket is that at some point you are likely waiting on getting the right invitation. Maybe you got lucky and are hoarding invitations, but if not then you are stuck waiting for the roll of the die to let you draw the top invitation. Then if you manage to get the right invitation you still need to get a gift, get to the party, chill for the rest of that turn, and then you need exact count to win. Our play became long.

This frustration mounted with some of our players. Bill tried to cheat by choosing the invitation he needed and claiming victory. For those of us that played properly, I won Polly Pocket!

The winning Polly Pocket just about to leave her final party for home!

play or pass

Props for cuteness but Polly Pocket is a pass. Next to a penny, my enjoyment of the game would appear very small. Polly Pocket suffers from typical roll and move shortcomings that overly extend gameplay. And if it’s that difficult to get invited to a party, you probably shouldn’t go. Maybe Midge doesn’t want you there.

Review: Fat Chance

By On April 4, 2021 With No Comments

Review: Fat Chance
Publisher: Gamewich, Inc.
Year: 1996
Players: 2 to 6
Tagline: Winner Loses All!

A plate that says Fat in what appears to be fat, then chance in a skinnier font and underlined by celery

how we met

I found Fat Chance at some random thrift shop during some random stop. As you can probably tell from the cover image, this is not to be confused with the 1978 Fat Chance in a similar vein which I hope to find someday. I could tell by looking at the box that gameplay and theme is similar to Heavenly Body which we reviewed very early on in setting up this site.

But Heavenly Body is 1988 while Fat Chance is 1996. I wondered how differently they might approach the topic of nutrition and dieting nearly ten years apart, if they approached it differently at all. And I have this game group, and the darlings will play just about anything. So I picked it up!

how it plays

Fat Chance is a roll and move game. Each player begins the game with 20 Lard tokens. The first player to successfully get rid of all of their Lard tokens wins Fat Chance!

The lard tokens look like small white gold bars
This is a snapshot of my Lard tokens during play

Players begin on the large center starting space and must make a decision which path to travel when they roll: Healthy Lifestyle or Crash Diet? Healthy Lifestyle takes more long-term approaches to weight loss. Many spaces on the board are trivia, and correct guesses allow you to lose one pound in Healthy Lifestyle. Incorrect guesses do not cause any weight gain. This track also includes special Sweat Stop spaces that allow you to roll the die and lose weight.

The Crash Diet track is more risky. Correct responses lose two pounds, but incorrect guesses will gain you one pound! And instead of Sweat Stop spaces we see Chow Down spaces that cause you to roll the die and gain weight!

Players must get all the way back to the starting space before they can change their diet approach. So once you begin down one of these tracks, you are on it for a number of turns.

Here’s a closer look at the board showing two different approaches to weight loss

Most of the spaces on the board result in you getting a question asked in that category. Other spaces on the board include Psychic Bonbons which mostly cause weight loss, or Heartbreak Plateau which causes you to lose two turns.

Most cards have flavor text and then list an amount of weight loss, but they also include the ability to confess weight loss stories and to do real exercises for weight loss
Here is a look at some varying Psychic Bonbons cards. I think these cards help demonstrate that the real challenge of the game is playing without touching something that is trademarked.

Eventually a player will manage to lose every single Lard token and they win Fat Chance!

how it went

Fat Chance is one of the last games our group played before we stopped in-person gaming, in February 2020. We all fondly remember the weirdness that was Heavenly Body, and Fat Chance was very easy to explain.

An overview of our board mid-play
Here we are mid-play

It seems clear that the right decision, the smart decision, is to take the Healthy Lifestyle track every single time. But you know me, why would I want to shed one pound when I can shed two? Keri and I stuck to the Crash Diet track the entire game while the guys stuck to Healthy Lifestyle.

I did not think our trivia knowledge was too far off of each other. Generally speaking, we all did okay at trivia. But at the end of the game us Crash Dieters were in pretty bad shape while Healthy Lifestyle players took first and second place. Bill won Fat Chance! John still had ten pounds to lose, I had 16 and Keri had 27!

A look at some of the trivia that Fat Chance has to offer

The differences that I was looking for between Fat Chance and Heavenly Body were even more pronounced than I expected. I’m not sure how much of that is tied to the years they were published vs just adopting different ideologies. But it was interesting. Both games emphasize smart decisions and exercise, but if you were to follow the diet advice of each game you would be on very different paths.

If you read the Heavenly Body review I talk about some of the weight gain tied to certain foods being strange and causing us to make up our own. Really Heavenly Body was introducing foods into our every day diets that a lot of people had abandoned. Heavenly Body was all about a balanced diet.

In contrast, Fat Chance seems to boil things down to “Fat is bad.” One of the things I read is that the Surgeon General’s report pointed out the dangers of dietary fat specifically in 1988. The problem here is what you replace that fat with. Carbs? Sugars? Or worse, high fructose corn syrup?

The Lard Card is meant to track your game weight loss over several plays. We did not take advantage of this tracking, but the point to show progress over time was well-made

The funny thing about board games that are meant to help you learn how to lose weight is that they imply there is some magic trick that you do not already know. That someone curated all the garbage science into the real answers. The real answers are portion control, counting calories and to a lesser degree staying active.

I have to give props to Fat Chance for its attempt to educate players via trivia on different foods having different calories – it’s not always obvious what you should choose. I also appreciate the different tracks and how clearly we saw the negative consequences of choosing what was obviously the wrong track. But I also think Fat Chance and its implication of fat being the worst thing for your diet has led us down a troubling road. That just makes it the kind of dated game I adore.

play or pass

Pass. This is not the first weight loss board game we have played and the review covers a lot of the differences. Fat Chance introduces neat new aspects to the gameplay thematically that I very much appreciate, but they are not enough to sustain a recommendation of tracking Fat Chance down. I recommended playing the other weight loss board game we reviewed, Heavenly Body, and I stand by that. Fat Chance does not have the same weird novelty that we so thoroughly enjoyed with Heavenly Body. Like, I didn’t get hit in the head with a soy bean even once during play.

Review: What’s Cookin’?

By On March 31, 2021 With No Comments

Review: What’s Cookin’?
Publisher: University Games
Year: 2008
Players: 4 or more
Tagline: The Dinner Party Game for Cooks, Foodies and Friends

Cover has food and people enjoying food in addition to title What's Cookin'?

how we met

Based on all available evidence, I bought What’s Cookin’? at a thrift shop for $1.99. The game is newer than most games I write about, but it’s also in nice shape and the box does a nice job of demonstrating the diversity of play. We get trivia, drawing, naming things and more! I was sold.

how it plays

What’s Cookin’? seems to be designed to be played before dinner, until dinner is ready. So the length varies with just the guidance of making sure each team has equal turns prior to dinner being served. The team with the most points wins!

NOTE: Alternatively the instructions recommend playing to 15 points.

Players separate into two teams. The first team to go rolls the die and plays the card for the corresponding category, or chooses their category if they roll yellow. The stickers on the die are all the same shape, so if anyone in your play group struggles with differentiating colors just add some shapes to the colors.

There are five possible card categories and teams get 30 seconds for each turn:

  1. What’s Cookin’? (blue) – The other team will read you a list of ingredients and you must guess the dish being described. A correct guess gets 1 point.
  2. What’s A Spatula? (red) – One person from your team chooses this card and draws a picture of the kitchen item on the card. A correct guess gets 1 point.
  3. Melting Pot (green) – The other team will list a dish and you must guess where it originated. A correct guess gets 1 point.
  4. Renowned Restaurants (orange) – The other team will tell you the name of a renowned restaurant and you must guess its location from the multiple choice options. A correct guess gets 1 point.
  5. Foodie First (purple) – The other team will tell you a category from the card and you must list as many items as you can think of that fit this category. You can get up to 5 points for 5 correct guesses.
The box holding cards separated by category
The box boasts over 700 questions across these 220 cards

The game throws in chips also. Each team has a Group Play chip that can only be played once per game. You can play your Group Play chip before the other team rolls the die to make the next play an All Play/Group Play. Turn order remains the same but either team can score the point.

The other chip is called the Bonus Token. This can also be played once per game by each team before a die roll and doubles the points earned that round. A loss will lose you 1 point.

Components include a die, sand timer, markers, chips, a main chip and a stand
The components for you to see. The stand is meant to hold the score card (and yes my bonus token is broken)

As stated above, the team with the most points after an even number of turns when dinner is served wins!

how it went

We played What’s Cookin’? many, many moons ago on a weekly game night. We had already eaten so we elected to play to 10 points instead.

I am not much of a cook, so I was worried about enjoying What’s Cookin’? But, as so often happens, the game exceeded my (albeit low) expectations. Many of the questions were within my grasp despite my lack of topical knowledge and somewhat unrefined palette (I once ate a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto Burrito).

Examples of the cards in each category
Here is a random sampling of each category

If there was one unwelcome category it would have to be Renowned Restaurants. That one is multiple choice, which helps a little, but I wonder about the wisdom of including restaurant knowledge in the game at all. I would guess these renowned restaurants may not all be around after a certain number of years, which puts a shelf life on the question. But perhaps this is not true for cooks and/or foodies.

FUN FACT: I took ten random Renowned Restaurant cards and googled. Six out of ten are still open, even one year through a pandemic. Another fun fact: I’m wrong all the time. I still didn’t like that category though. I didn’t know a damn one of them.

The variety of categories was fun, and this was really just a party/trivia game that is themed around cooking. It may shock you to hear this, but I’ve played much worse.

Whiteboards
The scoreboard and whiteboards, where drawings are meant to happen
Some of our drawings from play
But we decided to draw on paper, I think because the whiteboards did not erase nicely. I had to use alcohol to erase a particularly memorable sketch from John

According to the scoresheet we enjoyed a very close game but Bill and I snuck out the win.

play or pass

I’m going to say pass, unless you have a very particular fondness for cooking. I was impressed by how accessible the game was to me as the furthest thing from a chef, but one of the five categories seems very limited. I think What’s Cookin’ ultimately pulls off what it is trying to do, which is be a fun, casual way to pass the time waiting for dinner to be ready. The game is perfect for its intended audience of cooks and foodies, but I would be hesitant to recommend it generally.

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