Crazy man, just crazy! (Drummond Park Articulate!)

Member Name: tazzywazzy

Product:	Drummond Park Articulate!
Date:	15/10/07 (157 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: see review!

Disadvantages: none really worth mentioning!

~Bit of banter to make review more interesting~

Since going off on some jolly holidays, I have found that my bank account has been suffering (obviously those millions of pounds I earn from ciao are sitting in a high interest savings account), so in an attempt to save money, I have taken to having games nights with my sister, her boyfriend and Snarf. We have played a couple of games (left over from our childhood), but the most recent that we played was Articulate.
~Bit about Articulate (to bulk out this review)~

I first discovered this hilarious game a couple of Christmas' ago, when Snarf's parents bought it as a "family" present, and last year, Snarf got it in his stocking, and last night we finally broke it out of it's cellophane wrapper.
There is unfortunately a minimum of 4 players for this game, and little sis' boyfriend was working, so there were only 3 of us, but this game is so good we cunningly found a way around it - but more about that later and back to the game.

Articulate is a brilliantly simple game, aimed at 12 years old + and you can have any number of players from (according to the box) 4 - 20(+), the aim of the game is to get your little cone round the board to the finish line before the opposing teams - now the way that you get around the board is by guessing what a member of your team is describing from the cards supplied, and guessing as many as possible before your 30 seconds run out - sound simple so far? Well it is!
~What's in the Box?~

For the princely sum of £24.99 (RRP) you get a round board, a little spinner, for the middle of the board, 4 playing pieces, a little egg timer and a bundle of cards, about the size of a credit card (in a nice little box, for nice tidy storage)
~Playing the Game~

The board is basically split up to look a bit like a dartboard, with lots of different coloured segments (42 in total - 6 lots of the 7 colours listed below) on it, each coloured segment represents a colour (which in turn represents a category) as follows:
Cyan - Object
Orange - Action
Dark Blue - World
Yellow - Person
Red - Random
Green - Nature
White (with a spade symbol) - pretty much like a wild card

On each card, there is a word, on the left hand side, and opposite the word, on the right is a little coloured square, that will correspond to the colour of the segment that you landed on, on the board.
So for example, everyone starts on the cyan segment, cunningly marked "start" so the first team to go would describe the object (next to the cyan square). When the team guesses correctly, the "describer" then takes another card and reads off the object from the next card, and so on and so forth.

So you think that you have grasped the whole concept of the game and you are ready to play? Well hold your horses cowboy - there is a twist (dun dun duuuhhn!)
There are certain segments in the middle of the board where the spinner is located, if you land on an orange or red segment where this phenomenon occurs, you will find that you get a go on the ol' spinner, what happens next is very interesting - if the spinner stops on any of the red or orange segments within the middle of the board, then nothing happens - bit dull eh? But wait! If you land on a green segment (depending on whether it is big or small) you get to either move your team's piece one or two places forward...or....the good bit! Move a piece, belonging to an opposing team one or two spaces back - this is particularly good if you know that a team is particularly rubbish on a topic!

*phew* after all that excitement, I'm not sure that I could deal with any more twists, but the team at Drummond Park Games have decided that just one twist alone is not enough, so have added another one! The white segment on the board - now if you piece lands on this segment, the "describer" from your team has to take a card and describe the word that has a little spade symbol next to it - but wait, the description is open to everyone! If a team mate of said describer gets the word from the description, that team gets another go (guessing the words with the little spade next to them), if another team guesses, then they get the turn (this could be interesting if playing with more than one team). A second little twist (these guys are crrrrrr-aaaaaaa-zeeee cats!) the spade symbol appears on any given category, so you could end up describing anything!!!
Final thing is how to win - the cool kids at Drummond Park decided to add yet another twist - will the excitement never cease? Once a team passes or reaches the finish line, a describer has to describe one of the spade words - if a member of their team get it right, then the team wins, but if another team guesses, then the team sitting on the finish line needs to wait until their go, and try all over again!

~Experience (if you can bear all the excitement)~
As mentioned earlier, cunning souls that we are, we only had three players last night, so we devised a plan - we would play 3 rounds, and two players would go head to head, and the third player would do the guessing for both teams, we would then swap around so everyone would get a turn playing each other and guessing.

This actually turned out really well, and was a lot of fun, and in a way seemed really fair, you couldn't complain that you had a really crap guesser on your team, as it was the same as the other persons!
Later on in the evening lil' sis' boyfriend joined and we played properly, couples v couples - we started playing at 9pm and finished about about quarter past midnight and there was lots of laughter - the "my face hurts, don't make me laugh anymore laughter". We enjoyed it so much, we are actually going to play it again tonight - but Johnston Sisters Vs Stoopid boys! We also "bended" the rules a little and decided that we would alternate the guesser and describer, just to add even more crazy fun into the mix!

Finally, I would highly recommend this to anyone, it is a great game to play with a group of friends, after dinner, or just to kill some time, it is even more fun when alcarmarol is added into the mix (and anything else that you might find laying around the house), and is brilliant fun when played in a family environment - nothing more competetitive than families, and listening to siblings playing is highly amusing, as my sis and I found last night, in some cases you can get a word from a grunt!
The only draw back that I could find with this game is that there are only 4 little pieces, I guess this is ok, if you are playing with more than say 8, you could either have bigger teams, or find something to use instead - a monopoly piece maybe? the choice is yours!

*Interesting Tazzy Fact Alert*
I looked up the word articulate and I got the following definitions:
1. divided into syllables or words meaningfully arranged - this is very clever cus the board is divided into sections and they are meaningfully (well to me) arranged!

2. consisting of segments united by joints - these catz are just too clever! the board is divided into segements and they are all joined together, one might even say that they are united!

Summary: Brilliant family fun!