Bezzer What? (Mattel Bezzerwizzer Trivia Game)

Member Name: cyberem78

Product:	Mattel Bezzerwizzer Trivia Game
Date:	10/12/08 (343 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, challenging, new style of trivia game.

Disadvantages: Rules are complicated and difficult to learn.

Bezzerwizzer is a new board game for adults made by the Mattel Company. The name of the game means 'Know it all' in Danish and refers to the trivia aspect of the game play.

~About the game ~

Bezzerwizzer contains a board game around which players or teams move their game pieces from start to finish. There are four coloured player pieces (red, blue, green and yellow) and each player/team retains a tile board of the same colour. There are also 5000 questions split over twenty different categories. The game also contains a bag full of black tiles which have a white picture printed on them which represent the different categories of questions. The categories are:

Architecture, Art and Stage, Business World, Communities, Design, Film, Food and Drink, Geography, History, Humans, Language, Literature, Music, Nature, Politics, Science, Sports, Technology, Traditions and Beliefs and TV and Radio.

There are also bezzerwizzer tiles - these are coloured and marked with the letter 'b'. There are also 'zwap tiles' - these are also coloured tiles and marked with the letter 'z'.

~How To Play~

The game can be played by up to four players or teams. Each team selects a coloured playing piece and takes a tile board of the corresponding colour. Each team also takes two bezzerwizzer tiles and one zwap tile and places these on their tile board on the left hand side.

The category tiles are placed in the bag and each team choose four tiles each. The teams look at the category tiles they have chosen and decide which category they might succeed in or fail in. Tiles are then placed in the four squares on the tile board. The squares have dots above them which correspond to the number of points you will win for answering the question correctly. So, the tile for the category you are most confident about, for example, will be placed on the fourth square which has four dots above it, therefore four points available.

Teams/players take turns to ask each other the questions according to the tiles on one another's boards. You begin by asking the question for the tile that will win you one point.

The game is played in rounds - with four questions in each round per team/player. When a question has been asked and answered the category tile is turned over.

More points can be won in the game by playing a bezzerwizzer tile. Teams/players can play these tiles either before the question of an opposing team is read or after the question is read. The point of this is you must answer the question yourself based on your confidence about the category or the question. If you bezzerwizzer before the question and your opponent does not know the anser and you get it right you get three points. Answering correctly after the question is read earns you one point.

Zwap tiles can be used once per round to swap a category tile with another team/player. This means you can steal the best category from your oponent!

Each point earned allows your playing piece to advance around the board in a clockwise direction. The first team/player to reach 'Finish' wins.

~My Experience of The Game~

I have recently got this game and have played it as a single player against another single player. I found the rules quite difficult to understand initially and we made many errors during the first game. The allocation of and when to play the bezzerwizzer tiles was a complicated issue as was the amount of points awarded for each method of play. However, once we fully understood how the game could be played it moved along effortlessly.

The questions are sometimes very difficult and othertimes are fairly simple but this is definately a game for adults only. A lot of the questions allude to moments in history and even a clever teenager could struggle to know the answers. I might even say that the questions are a little high brow.

I think this game would be even more exciting played by many teams as the tension would be greater and there would be much more competition, which is the point of the game.

It is definately a game which allows you to somewhat eliminate the aspect of luck when getting a question in a particular category. Unlike similar board games such as Trivial Pursuit - where a roll of the dice decides which category you have to answer, in Bezzerwizzer you can steal categories and choose how many points you will earn! This is very satisfying.

It takes around 40 minutes to one hour to play but winning depends on how well you can answer the questions and gain points which will advance your piece!

The game is entertaining, sustains interest throughout and is a new and different format of the typical trivia based board games.

~Where to Buy~

It is available to buy at Hamleys, priced at £33 and also at WH Smith, Amazon, Toymaster and Firebox.com.

You can read more about the game at the website:

www.bezzerwizzer.co.uk

Summary: A entertaining trivia based board game.