SuperflyCircus Pete
United States
Independence
Kentucky
www.superflycircus.blogspot.com - Best Reviews Ever!
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Reprinted From The Superfly Circus
www.superflycircus.blogspot.com
My eldest daughter wanted to pick a game for a new game review, and she selected one of her favorite games of all-time, Sorry Sliders. It’s a simple dexterity game that uses Hershey's Kiss style pawns like those from the original Sorry game, but these have ball bearings built into the bottom so they, well, slide. The object is to flick or toss your wee sliders (no, not White Castle sliders, the pawns) down one of the 4 colored lanes to an attached "bull’s eye" panel with concentric rings valued at one point at the edges up to five in the center. It’s really a simple sounding game, but in practice it’s a heck of a lot harder than you’d expect, provided you have able opponents who are trying to hose you over at every turn, making it very difficult to score.
The game is a typical Hasbro/Parker Bros./Milton Bradley family game, in the standard family game type box, with some art on the front that reasonably depicts the gameplay. Once you crack open the box, the contents are of the typical game-mill quality, with ample little goodies included. Inside are four lane sections in four colors, two target sections, four scoring cards, four pawns of each color, and four scoring pawns, as well as some plastic backboards to keep the sliders from launching off of the back and taking out your eyes when your children get a little overexcited. Also included is a rules guide which is very easy to read and remarkably well written.
The first thing to do is decide how many players are going to play, hand out the pawns and scoring cards, and hand out the lanes. This is pretty simple as everything is color coded, but once this is done you then must decide how to configure the track. There are a multitude of options, depending on which of the ample variations you wish to play. The fact that there are two double-sided target pads gives you a lot of variety in the track configuration, but unfortunately all of the variants are only variants in name as the game itself is pretty much the same no matter how you elect to configure it. The more interesting of the two target sections has a hole in the center to catch pawns, allowing you to bollocks your opponents by knocking them into it, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same with either target pad. Regarding the lanes, you can attach them to the targets with little hooks, which was brilliant on the part of the designers, and you can set them up in myriad configurations to make the lane area longer than the normal 1-lane-length-per-player configuration. We’ve played this game a few hundred times, it seems, and we have used every piece that came in the game, but we’ve yet to see a huge difference in the gameplay.
The long and short is that you take your little sliding pawns and toss them down your lane to the target area, attempting to land within a numbered concentric ring and score some points while also knocking your opponents into less desirable areas, or ideally, off the board through little corner openings marked "Sorry". Everyone takes turns tossing their pawns until all the pawns are played, at which point a scoring round occurs. If any pawns went off the board, or in the case of the target with the hole fall in, the player has to take their highest-point scoring pawn and move it back to start. Pawns that were scored move a corresponding scoring pawn forward on the scoring track to Home, meaning those pawns are safe. You can only move each scoring pawn once per round, so any unusable points are lost. Furthermore, if you score too many points with a pawn, you cannot reduce the scored pawns’ value, meaning you have to hit exactly the right amount without going over, a la Price Is Right. I will say that the game is actually a lot of fun until you’ve played it twenty times in a row as my daughter likes to do, which can be grating at best.
The winner of the game is the first person to get all four pawns across the finish line on their scoring track to Home, which is the seventh space on the track from start. It’s really a quick game, and from setup to a winner being decided is usually within 15 minutes. Although the game itself is not incredibly engaging, it is colorful and very accessible. I would recommend it for parents with kids in the seven to twelve year age bracket, and beyond that it’s going to sit on a shelf and gather dust. Don’t even think about following Agricola or Race for the Galaxy with Sorry Sliders, it just isn’t that type of game.
Things I thought were pretty slick:
*The game is very quick to learn, assemble, and get to playing
*Although pretty simple, the components are of good quality and very colorful
*While not Pitchcar, it’s not a bad little game if you want to play a dexterity-based game
*Playing with the family makes this a backstabbity little nugget that just may end up having your kids want to knuckle you up
Things I thought were lame as hell:
*The game includes a bunch of "variety" options, but the variety amounts to a choice between "very mediocre" and "can I slice my wrists now?"
*The game is so quick that you end up playing four or five times in a row, and you’ll probably be sick of it by round three
*The game is about as absorbing as a block of stone
Overall:
This is a simple, simple game with just a miniscule amount of strategy involved, but for what it is, it’s pretty decent. I would recommend it for families with a couple of kids, but that’s about it. This is not a game for adults, unless those adults are imprisoned or have been otherwise institutionalized for some manner of mental handicap. It’s just not all that incredibly fun, even if you like playing games with your kids.
Rating:
2.0/5 Stars
Interesting note: This was designed by Craig Van Ness, the Genius Of All Time who invented Heroscape.
Read more about Sorry Sliders at www.hasbro.com
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John W
United States
Sacramento
California
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You channel Drake's Flames poorly.
What's weird about your review is, you actually slam Sorry Sliders for not being strategic.
WTF?
And you actually felt the need to recommend people not to equate Agricola/RftG with Sorry Sliders?
Also, for some reason you decided to be butch/hard on the game your daughter picked for a new review.
Your personal rating is a 6 out of 10 - yet this "professional"  rating is 4 out of 10.
Are you bipolar?
Because you contradict yourself when you say "There is a heaping helping of strategy available to you, surprisingly, and the game is actually a lot of fun" yet you summarize your review with "This is a simple, simple game with just a miniscule amount of strategy involved"
Your claims are demonstrably false, as well :
Quote: "unfortunately all of the variants are only variants in name as the game itself is pretty much the same no matter how you elect to configure it."
I defy anyone to set the boards up with the 1-length Instant Sorry board, then compare the gameplay with the red scoreboard but 2-length tracks opposing each other, then play with 3-length track on the blue scoreboard and then say they all play the same.
Heck, you can handicap a player by having one person play 2 or 3 tracks while the other plays 1 track.
You didn't mention the affordable cost of Sorry Sliders, which is an interesting omission (unless you live in a world where price of the game is not a concern) and your nod to Pitchcar is interesting, since it too can be simplified down to "you flick the piece and try to keep it on the track - what a simple, simple game with just a miniscule amount of strategy involved."
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SuperflyCircus Pete
United States
Independence
Kentucky
www.superflycircus.blogspot.com - Best Reviews Ever!
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reapersaurus wrote: You channel Drake's Flames poorly.
Gee, thanks. Were I making some attempt to do so, I might have been offended, but seeing as Drake is a close friend of mine who I had dinner with this very evening, I'll pass this gem of wisdom along. He does his thing, and he's a better at it than pretty much anyone, and I do my best to write entertaining, informative reviews. The seven to ten thousand hits I get through syndication and my own site help me sleep at night, though, I will admit.
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What's weird about your review is, you actually slam Sorry Sliders for not being strategic.
What's weird? It's not. It's a simple board game for playing with your kids. What's the problem? Not too strategic. There could've been more strategy in the game if Craig had opted to, but he aimed at making it fun for kids, and non-gaming parents, I'd bet, and in that aim he has done a remarkable job. Like I said, my kid LOVES the game, as do her friends, and I do nothing to dissuade readers from buying the game. All I do is point out that this is a children's game, and that primarily children will like it.
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WTF?
Funny, after reading your post I thought the EXACT same thing!
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And you actually felt the need to recommend people not to equate Agricola/RftG with Sorry Sliders?
All I said was that following one of those games with Sliders is a bit like following 18-year Macallan scotch with a Pabst Blue Ribbon. Not equating, just telling my readers that if you're looking for a quick follow-up game to close a heavy game night, this isn't it.
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Also, for some reason you decided to be butch/hard on the game your daughter picked for a new review.
And? If she'd have picked out Enchanted Forest or Pictureka, it would've been a different tune. I wasn't hard on the game at all, anyhow, I simply told the truth about how I felt about it. Go back to reading Penthouse Letters if you want fiction, because I do what I do and I make no excuses. If you're trying to imply something about my relationship with my daughter, well, then you and I will have a problem, bro.
Quote: Your personal rating is a 6 out of 10 - yet this "professional" rating is 4 out of 10.
You must be transposing numbers, mate. I just checked and it's a 4 on my "collection".
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Are you bipolar?
Yeah, I was fine until I read this response, and now I'm shaking my head wondering why I'm bothering to respond. Guess that's bipolar.
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Because you contradict yourself when you say "There is a heaping helping of strategy available to you, surprisingly, and the game is actually a lot of fun" yet you summarize your review with "This is a simple, simple game with just a miniscule amount of strategy involved"
The only good that came out of this little diatribe of yours is that you caught an editorial error. I went back to the original document I wrote this up on and found this to be an artifact. Honestly, thanks for pointing that out, I take my writing seriously and I sure as hell did leave a line in there that shouldn't have been.
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Your claims are demonstrably false, as well :
Guy, maybe you're not getting this, but THIS IS AN OPINION PIECE. My claims are my own. I make no excuses and I stand by them. The game is about the same no matter how you configure it - toss pawns, score pawns, yawn, put game back in box and get brownie points from kid for playing a game she likes to play, even though you can only take 1-2 rounds before suicidal thoughts enter your consciousness. Uh oh, there's that bipolar thing again.
Pete wrote: "unfortunately all of the variants are only variants in name as the game itself is pretty much the same no matter how you elect to configure it."
Sauras wrote:
I defy anyone to set the boards up with the 1-length Instant Sorry board, then compare the gameplay with the red scoreboard but 2-length tracks opposing each other, then play with 3-length track on the blue scoreboard and then say they all play the same.
Heck, you can handicap a player by having one person play 2 or 3 tracks while the other plays 1 track.
Uh, yeah guy, whoa. Worlds of difference. Toss pawns, score pawns. Wow, you got me there. Huge difference. For comparison, what I consider variation in a game is more along the line of Space Hulk. Sure, the game mechanics are essentially the same no matter what scenario you elect to play, there's so many choices there with different units to play with unique capabilities, different goals to achieve, and even though the maps are all variants of each other, which is similar to this, the game itself is DIFFERENT when you have different victory conditions, different units in play, what-have-you. That's variation. Unless you had a pawn with a ring on it that scored triple or something, the game is the same, over, and over, ad. nauseum.
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You didn't mention the affordable cost of Sorry Sliders, which is an interesting omission (unless you live in a world where price of the game is not a concern)
I also didn't specify the polymeric composition of the pawns, nor did I specify the grade of steel used in ball bearings, and come to think of it, I didn't specify the durometer hardness of the manual's paper. Man, you got me there. I'll have to be more careful next time. Just for the record, yeah, I earn a good bit of money and can pretty much buy whatever game I want, but my note that the game itself is a Hasbro/xx/xx Family Game pretty much clues the reader into the price point being at about twenty bones, seeing as it's in Wal-Mart and whatnot...
Quote: and your nod to Pitchcar is interesting, since it too can be simplified down to "you flick the piece and try to keep it on the track - what a simple, simple game with just a miniscule amount of strategy involved."
Pitchcar is FUN. Big difference there. It's also 3 times as expensive, has a far more varied configurability factor, and has a lot more strategy involved in placement before turns, how far to travel into straightaways...you know what....I'm tired of this, so I'm going to chalk this up to "don't feed the trolls" and walk.
Have a great night, thanks for reading and really, honestly, thanks for catching that typo, I do indeed appreciate that, if nothing else. Oh, and I'll tell Drake you said "hi" when I talk to him next week.
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www.superflycircus.blogspot.com - Best Reviews Ever!
