And Now For Something Completely Different…A “Bored” Game Review (The Amazing Race DVD Game)
On a Sunday morning a few weeks ago I was reading the news paper and saw a small article talking about a new DVD board game based on the reality TV series The Amazing Race. My wife and I are big fans of this show, so I immediately made a mental note to try and find and buy it. It finally came in the mail late last week after I ordered via Target’s online store, and we eagerly awaited a chance to play it. The day it came we made an attempt, but it is team based, with two member teams, so it requires at least four people.
Last night we had friends over to eat dessert fondue (which essentially means dipping things into melted Hershey bars, which is not a problem for me) and play the game. All of us have small children, so when we get together it is hard to actually do anything because we have to spend most of the time babysitting them. Still, we were committed to playing The Amazing Race DVD Board Game.
The object of the game is to make your way around a circular game board. There are four “rest stops” along the way that are spread at equal intervals. The final rest stop is the end of the game. The entire process (other than physically moving the game pieces on the board) is controlled via a DVD. You enter how many teams there are and what color each team wants to be before beginning a game and then the DVD is used to calculate movement distance (like rolling dice) and ask questions. At the beginning of a turn you press the “roll” button in the DVD interface and it has a spinning dial (like the one used for Twister) that can land on an integer from one to four. During our game we landed on four about 75% of the time, which leads me to believe that the random number generator used by the spinner code isn’t quite up to par. So, after you spin you automatically move your game piece that many spaces. You then select the button on the DVD that correlates to whatever space you landed on. Generally you are asked a question that deals with Geography or some other category related in some way to The Amazing Race. If you get the question correct you move again, if not your turn ends. The rest stops have only seven spaces between them, so two moves of four will get you from one rest stop to the next. When you reach a rest stop your turn ends and you are not asked a question. This is a huge negative factor in the game. Because the pieces move regardless of whether a question is answered correctly or not, in two turns a team can move from one rest stop to the next without answering a single question! This happened frequently in our game because we were all spinning moves of four so frequently. It is disheartening to be able to get to get 75% through the game without having to answer a single question.
Notice I said 75%. Movement from the third to the final pit stop is handled differently. When you land on the third pit stop you have to answer eight questions, and move one space for each question that is answered correctly. You continue until you get one wrong and then pick up from that spot when it becomes your turn again. Finally, I thought, the game is improving a little bit. But no, the game quickly degraded from boring to downright stupid. When the second team got to the third pit stop the game began asking them the exact same questions that it asked my team. Since we had gotten three correct in our first attempt the other team simply had to remember what we had answered (since it says on the screen what the correct answer is) to catch right up to us. The laziness on the part of the creators of the game is inexcusable. They could have easily created 30 questions at this point of the game and randomly selected the eight from that pool, but no, they created exactly eight and took the last bit of excitement out of an already unexciting game. To top it off, the questions were multiple choice, with four possible answers. So if the first two teams get the same question wrong, the third team will have a 50% chance of getting it correct. If even they choose incorrectly the first team would now know the answer for certain. This “race” at the end of the game could have been fun, but instead turned into a memorization contest.
I have nothing good to say about this game. First of all, it would have been much better if there were no DVD involved. Why have a spinner on the screen when a single die would do the trick just fine? Why not have question cards instead of having them displayed on the television? Sure, some of the question types utilized video from the show, but most of them were straight up trivia that would have been better on a card. Realize that this is coming from a prototypical electronics and computer geek. It really boils down to proper use of the technology. Shoehorning what should be a classical board game onto a DVD does not make it better. I am not going to apply any sort of numerical rating to this review, I will close by stating that my copy was posted for sale on Craigslist less than an hour after we finished playing. Please don’t buy this game…but if you HAVE to there is a practically new one available here.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
What are you talking about Steve? That game was GREAT! Seriously, I think that’s the only game in hell.