You don't have to be articulate to play, in fact it's funnier if you're not! (Drummond Park Articulate!)

Member Name: maths_babe

Product:	Drummond Park Articulate!
Date:	06/07/09 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hugely entertaining, easy to understand, fast-paced, loads of fun

Disadvantages: A lot of the people and places I have never heard of!

Articulate is a really entertaining, fast-paced family game with very easy to understand gameplay.

The premise is this: you get into teams of at least two, and choose a playing piece. The board is just a traditional one, but with a spinner in the middle which a team spins if they land on a special square, giving them the opportunity to move a few squares forwards or backwards. The object of the game is to be the first team to reach the finish line.

If it is your team's go, one of you starts by drawing a card from the box, and, depending on the square your piece is on, will look at one of the words on the card. The different categories are: Object (light blue), World (dark blue), People (Yellow), Nature (Green), Random (Red) and Action (Orange). That person then has to describe that thing/place/action or whatever without saying things like it rhymes with x, or it begins with y. As soon as their team mates have guessed the word, they then pick up the next card and continue on until the eggtimer (supplied) runs out of sand. Then you count up how many words you managed to do, and then move your piece that many squares across the board. Simple!

Sometimes you have ones where the whole group have to guess, and the person describing has to be really careful that the clues they give will only help their team mates, and not the rest. This can be really funny. I usually resort to describing the word in terms of Pokémon so that my boyfriend will get it but no one else will!

I love this game, it's very fast-paced and it's not one of those games where every time you play you have to remind everyone of the rules because they're so simple and easy to remember.

One problem I come across often though is that sometimes a player won't know what the word means or who the person is or where the place is. Luckily, you can get round this by describing something that the word sounds like, and then saying that it sounds like that. (This isn't cheating: there's a difference between saying, it rhymes with cat and saying it rhymes with the domestic animal that isn't a dog).

So, to round it off, let's say I'm playing this now, and the word on my card is Articulate. I would say this to my team mates: "Board game. Loads of fun. Describing things really quickly. Easy to understand. Quick to set up. Totally addictive. Buy it now! Take it on holiday!"

Summary: A brilliant board game to take on holiday and then save for Christmas