Brandt Fundak
United States
Cleveland
Ohio
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As mentioned in my review for 10 Days in the USA, my wife and I were recently invited over to another couple's house for gaming. However, since they were friends of my wife and not of me, I wasn't able to shoehorn my game choices into play until the end of the night and then only got a chance to play 10 Days because it was getting late and we all have kids. As a result, most of the game time was used playing Balderdash. I've been deep in Eurogaming since August of 2009. Had the ensuing year turned me into a game snob? Could I be willing to admit that Balderdash might have redeeming qualities even though it wasn't Power Grid or Agricola?
The components of Balderdash are pretty simple--the game comes with a game board that has spaces on it where players move their plastic colored pieces across the board. The game also comes with a box of cards that contain the different elements that need to be defined by the players as part of the game play. The game also comes with a pad of answer sheets for players to write their bluffed definitions on, but it didn't seem to me that it came with very many of them. Having seen the giant pad of double sided score sheets that came with Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, I may now have unrealistic expectation of how many score/answer sheets should come with a game, but if the game depends on those sheets for game play, you should get a lot of them, especially given that Balderdash is published by Mattel, who I am sure has lower printing costs than Gryphon Games, who released RTtA. Our hosts said they didn't mind, because they owned a printing business, but still, the fact that I made a comment about it that had to be answered like that still bothers me.
Game play is pretty simple. Each round, one of the players selects a card and rolls a die to see which category is in play. The remaining players then have to write down a bluff answer to the word, acronym, person, movie title or law selected on the card. The reader of the card then reads all of the answers that the players have writen down and the non-readers have to select the ones they think are right. Any bluffed answers selected score points for the player who wrote it. Players also score for picking the answer on the card, or for writing the answer that is on the card. The points are then converted into movements on the game board and the first player to move their pawn across the finish line wins.
Now don't get me wrong--I don't take a game Balderdash seriously at all. The driving force behind Balderdash is to hear the ridiculous responses people come up with for the different words and get some mirth from that. It's a party game, pure and simple. The problem with Balderdash, however, is that there are many party games out there, such as Bang!, Apples to Apples and for the more adult crowd, Funny Friends, that make Balderdash a game that I would likely steer clear from when looking for a party game.
The first problem I have with Balderdash is that it suffers from something I call the "Trivial Pursuit" problem. I hold the first genus of Trivial Pursuit in higher esteem than later editions. Why? Because the first genus tried not to insult the players intelligence and had a category called "Arts and Literature." Everyone who I played Trivial Pursuit hated that category because they didn't know it, and it was always the category used as the last category chosen when a player was looking to win the game. If you were able to win the game after getting two of those answers right, you likely deserved it. Enough people must have complained about that category however, that eventually it was removed from the game and a "Wild Card" category was added. To me, that dumbing down of Trivial Pursuit is what killed that game for me--if you are buying a general trivia game, wouldn't you want the questions to be somewhat difficult? Balderdash has the same issue--it was originally just a word game and the other categories didn't exist. However, all versions made since 2006 implement the concepts of Beyond Balderdash, which had more than just words for categories. I understand that Mattel is in the business to move product, and that dumbing down the game to appeal to more semi-literate players is probably a good business move, but it just makes the game less appealing to me.
Another issue I had with the game was the level of detail on the cards. One of the things I like about Apples to Apples is that you are basically limited to playing a one word noun to the one word adjective that has been played. You make the connection between the two in your head and hope that the judging player sees it your way. With Balderdash, I felt like it was sometimes easy to detect what the answer on the card was, because of the level of detail on the card. The other players would either use too little or too much detail that made the card answer stick out like a sore thumb. Again, I know I am not supposed to take game play seriously, but when the manufacturers make that pattern obvious, it's hard for me to not to try and capitalize (especially if it can get the game ended and us on to something better.)
I know that Balderdash is supposed to be a humorous party game, but to me, the laughs generated were few and far between. I think a game like Apples to Apples, where you can put together some truly ridiculous combinations between just two words is a much more humorous party game, or even a more complicated game like Funny Friends, where ultimately you are trying to get drunk, laid and stoned generates way more in the the chuckles department. I had strongly considered bringing Apples to this particular get together, but I didn't know our hosts well enough to gauge what their sense of humors were and to me, that's most of the fun of playing Apples. Balderdash was just a boring waste of time.
In the end, perhaps I am a game snob. But when you have seen how a well designed board game works and how much fun they can be, it's really hard to go back. If that makes me a snob, so be it. But Balderdash seriously had me reconsidering me "I'd rather play a game than not play at all rule." It's honestly that bad.
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tom moughan
United States
Rochester
New York
ahh....I love the smell of a stack of sketchily placed animals in the morning!
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awww...I used to love balderdash. It was great fun in my youth to play with my grandmother when we went to visit.
If you are going to bring apples anywhere (or hold it in high esteem), I'd suggest you invest in dixit.
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Tom Javoroski
United States
Keota
Iowa
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I'll go the opposite way.
I don't appreciate Apples to Apples much, and many people I know agree for the same reason. AtA suffers when you get players with very different senses of humor in the game. Player A gets frustrated when Player B seems to select 'winning' answers at random, and Player B doesn't see why Player A wants to select answers that aren't 'hilareous because they make no sense'. (For the record, I am a Player A type of person. I like answers in this game that contain some real wit, not just humor via randomness. Example: the word was 'Stonehenge', and my wife played a blank card, which we'd forgotten to remove from the game and she'd had dealt to her. I selected it as the winner after her explanation was "You know, Stonehenge, it's just...(hands spread in mock awe)". Other players couldn't understand why I didn't pick 'erotic' or 'juicy' instead.
I will say that Balderdash is better as the literacy of your players goes up. I don't mean that in an insulting 'ability to read' sort of way :) I mean that, the more skill your players have with the English language, the better this game gets.
And it's because of what you've pointed out. People who have a lot of skill with language are quickly able to pick up the language style of the cards, and then the game becomes quite challenging. For example, the last time I played this, it was at a party with 7 or 8 people from my department in grad school. Now, grad school doesn't mean that someone is necessarily intelligent in every meaning of that word, but you don't get to and through grad school without being able to use language very well (at least not in a 'humanity', which we were in). So the answers of most of the players were usually hard to pick out from the real answer. It was a crap shoot, although linguistic skill again can help you individually, as you can sometimes pick the right answer via roots and etymology. Let's face it, if you're a language geek, Balderdash is a great game :)
Apples to Apples requires people of similar attitudes and senses of humor, I'd say, while Balderdash requires people of approximate literacy...at least for the more literate people to enjoy. The less literate people may not be able to tell the correct answer by linguistic style, for example.
You can always just not use the other categories, too. I agree, the word definitions is by far the best way to play, and we often will just agree to only use that category.
Thanks for the review :)
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William Krick
United States
New Jersey
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I'm completely SHOCKED that anyone would discuss Balderdash and Apples to Apples in the same sentence let alone claim that Apples to Apples might be a better game.
Apples to Apples is quite possibly the least fun, most boring, waste of time game I have ever played. There's little to no skill or strategy involved. It might as well be completely random. I'd rather go to the dentist than play Apples to Apples.
Balderdash, on the other hand, is one of my all-time favorite games. The thing I love about it is that adults can play on equal footing with 10-year-old children. It really comes down to your ability to come up with answers that sound like something that might be on a card. Even a child can come up with a fake definitions like... "a small hairless animal with razor-sharp teeth" ...or... "a type of cheese made from cat milk".
That said, I'm not a big of the categories added in the Beyond Balderdash sequel. The acronyms are particularly difficult for many people. Simply coming up with something that fits the letters is in itself difficult, let alone something that sounds like a plausible answer. I definitely prefer the original version of the game.
To address your point about it sometimes being easy to detect the real answer... I find that the game works best when the Dasher actively tries to dissuade the other players from picking the right answer by purposefully stumbling, giggling, or laughing while reading the correct answer as if it was written poorly or was too silly to be real. And since the Dasher gets points if nobody picks the real answer, it's in the Dasher's best interest to "tweak" the submitted answers slightly if necessary to make them sound more convincing when read aloud.
Sometimes, I really don't care if I win. I just play to make people laugh. Isn't that what you really want in a party game anyway?
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Clyde Wright
United States
Washington
Dist of Columbia
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Agree. Apples to Apples is awful, Balderdash can be great, assuming the people you play it with understand that they must mimic the definitions given on the cards. Also, it helps if they're all creative and funny. Then then game is magic.
The much newer Cards Against Humanity goes a long way towards fixing Apples to Apples, but neither compares to Balderdash, which I just played last weekend for the first time in probably 15 years and loved it just as much as I did back in the day.
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