The Model Family Game (Drummond Park Rapidough)

Member Name: maths_babe

Product:	Drummond Park Rapidough
Date:	06/07/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great fun, easy to understand, good for kids, creative

Disadvantages: Could be messy

Rapidough is a fun family game which has simple rules. If you've ever played Cranium, then this is basically the bit from that that involves play-doh.

You split up into groups of at least two, and you get a pot of dough each, and a mat (to prevent blue-stuff-in-new-cream-carpet incidents!). One person from each team then looks at the first card, which will sometimes just have one word on it, sometimes three to choose from, and sometimes a list of colour-coded words so each team has to do the word in their colour. The idea of this is that way you can't look at what the other team is doing and guess from their model instead of your team's. Then the modellers from each team have to use their dough to get their team mates to guess the word. You can decide amongst yourselves to begin with what is and isn't allowed. For example, you might decide you're allowed to make your models move to help your team mates guess.

The team which guesses correctly first wins, and they get to take a lump of dough off the losers (not to use though- you don't want to mix all the colours up!). I must admit when we play this game we never bother with taking people's dough, we just keep the cards and at the end (which is simply when we get bored, or, more likely, it's very very late) we count them to see who's won. This works well as then you can dictate how long you play for.

There are normal cards and cards for kids with easier words on them. The game is supposed to be suitable for age 8 plus. I have played this game with an eleven year old and he gets on with it just fine. However, there are some words which players my age (twenty) don't know the meaning of. This isn't really a problem though. When my boyfriend had "deerstalker", not knowing that it was a type of hat, famously worn by Sherlock Holmes, he modelled a deer, and a man stalking it. Somehow I actually managed to guess it!

We've had the game for about two years and we've had to replace the dough as it got hard. But obviously any cheap play-doh works just fine.

This game is really entertaining and loads of fun. I've written reviews for Balderdash and Articulate, praising them loads, but we make sure we play Rapidough too because it's much more suitable for younger players than the other two, and much more fun for them too. I'd imagine it helps boost their creativity and even vocabulary, so that's a plus. It's also great fun for adults, and there's always much laughter at the pathetic attempts to model some things, and much awe at the absolutely brilliant models too!

A great family game. If you like pictionary, you'll love this!

Summary: A great family game, one of my favourites.