Game: Tribond

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Toynan — 2008-09-17T18:46:11+00:00

New box

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Capoeirista — 2008-02-09T01:49:39+00:00

Swedish edition box rear

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Capoeirista — 2008-02-09T01:48:41+00:00

Swedish edition box front

Thread: Re: Tribond Review

byronczimmer — 2007-12-30T05:36:11+00:00

ptper wrote:
If a team answers the question correctly, they then roll and move again. If they should answer incorrectly, the next person then takes their turn. Whomever reaches the final space and answers a question correctly first wins the game.

My Rating: 3/10

This one rule is the fatal flaw of this game.

I've seen a player, on their 'first turn' run all three of their pawns into the finish spaces. The rest of us just sat there like stunned monkies.

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cdefrisco — 2007-10-23T22:44:43+00:00

Sample cards from the 1989 Fun A Go Go version.

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radiok — 2007-05-11T13:04:04+00:00

Mattel Edition in unique raised box

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Dolphonic — 2007-04-26T14:15:14+00:00

2001 contents

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Dolphonic — 2007-04-26T14:14:50+00:00

Newer 2001 board

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Dolphonic — 2007-04-26T14:14:23+00:00

Back of box 2001

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Dolphonic — 2007-04-26T14:12:59+00:00

New box art 2001

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IronMoss — 2006-10-30T14:57:36+00:00

TriBond Diamond Edition Box

Thread: Tribond Review

ptper — 2005-11-11T17:18:02+00:00

Tribond is a game for at least 2 players, but is best with either 4 individuals or teams of 2-3. It is a race to the finish, with players advancing due to successful "grouping" of three things.

Each team begins at the start of the track. One player (team) begins by rolling the dice. They then move that many spaces along the track. Whatever color space they land on determines the category question they will then receive. With the great variety of Tribond themes on the market, these categories will/may change from game to game. The determining element of Tribond is that this question will ask the player/team to determine the relationship between three elements. For example, the card may read: "Elephant, Pine Tree, Mercedes Benz". The player/team must decide what they think all three things have in common. In this case, the correct answer would be "They all have trunks".

If a team answers the question correctly, they then roll and move again. If they should answer incorrectly, the next person then takes their turn. Whomever reaches the final space and answers a question correctly first wins the game.

Tribond is a decent game for players who enjoy trivia or similar type games. There is not a lot of deep thinking, and no strategy whatsoever. While the dice may force players to move at different rates, the winner will ultimately be the person who consistently groups the terms the best. Tribond features a large amount of player interaction, with one team reading the question, one team answering, and the rest silently thinking if they know the answer. It is a light game with very simple rules. I enjoyed this game more as a child, since I found it very challenging. As I have grown however, I have found many of the questions either rediculously simple of extraordinarly difficult. I would recommend you look for something on the BGG top 50, unless you are playing in a group that just does not like euros.

My Rating: 3/10

Thread: TriBond September 26, 2005: In Which a Challenge is Issued

gdunbar — 2005-09-28T04:06:51+00:00

For our second game of the evening, we surveyed the "six players and up" pile. The choice came down to Lord of the Rings with Sauron, which we had some familiarity with, or TriBond, which only the owner had heard of (and hadn't played in some years). Who can resist a step into the mysterious unknown? We couldn't.

Mr. Saucy made a quick survey of the rules, though it rapidly became obvious that TriBond is a trivia game first, with the gameplay a distant second. So we let Mr. Saucy read, nodded our heads at the appropriate times, and got down to the playing. We formed three groups of two, myself and Mrs. Saucy, Mr. Saucy and the Borrower, and the Neighbor and DG. After the requisite choice of which colored pawns our hopes would ride upon, we got down to business.

As most trivia games seem to, TriBond comes with a large deck of cards, each card containing one question in each of six categories. The twist on TriBond is that each "question" is in fact a list of three things, and the answer is the connection between the three. The questions vary from a sort of clever wordplay to your more standard trivia. So for instance "Varsity, Love, Capital" gave the answer "Letters", whereas "Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, Something Else" gave the answer "Landmarks of South Dakota". For the slower of my readers, "Something Else" wasn't actually on the card, but I can't recall the third. There is also a seventh "challenge" question on each card, which is basically the same except two teams try to get the answer at the same time.

The gameplay goes in the rather mundane pattern "roll for a category", "answer a question", "move your pawn and roll again if you got it right". Since the whole thing appears to be a Trivia Pursuit rip-off, this shouldn't be a big surprise. Perhaps because I've played Trivia Pursuit many more times, I found the gameplay to be inferior to the mechanics of that stately classic party/trivia game; your category is chosen at random rather than there being any choice, and the seemingly interesting "challenge" mechanism is almost always a bad idea if it can be avoided.

Mrs. Saucy and I cruised to a quick lead and coasted to a victory. Our ability to answer twenty-year-old "Arts and Entertainment" questions through sheer guesswork contributed strongly to our victory, while the other teams were hampered by the mutually harmful "challenge" rule. The questions, both in their content and the novel three-word format, kept us interested in the game despite the rather banal gameplay, and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. I personally would be perfectly willing to play again, but I'm not particularly looking forward to it.

Thread: Re:User Review

tolendante — 2005-03-11T20:37:45+00:00

The big problem with Tribond is that it is way too easy. We played three full games one night without misssing a question. We also took Travel Tribond on a trip once and played through the entire deck without once being stumped. Cranium has a similar problem, but Tribond is simply insanely easy.

Thread: User Review

potterama — 2005-01-27T13:31:34+00:00

Game Review: Tribond

The Quick and Dirty: Occasional lateral-logic puzzles spice up fairly easy trivia game.

Rules/Mechanics: Players, singly or divided into teams, select a pawn color and place one of their pawns on each of three identical tracks. First player is determined by die roll. On each player's turn, they roll a number die and category die, then read the appropriate set of three linked clues (called "threezers") from a common set of cards. Clues are generally linked thematically (liberty bell, U.S. mint, Independence Hall = three things that can be found in Philadelphia), and the player must determine what "bonds" the three. Answers must be fairly specific: "Huron, Ontario, and Superior" must be answered with "Great Lakes," not merely "lakes," for instance. A time limit is suggested by the manufacturers, but no timekeeping device is included with the game. If the player correctly guesses the element that "bonds" the three clues, they may move any one of their pawns along its track, and may go again. If a player lands a pawn on an opposing player's piece, a challenge is initiated -- a significantly easier set of clues which is read slowly by a neutral party -- the first team to guess the answer takes the contested space, and the loser is sent back to the challenger's original space on the track. Challenges may also be initiated by certain cards or by pre-marked spaces on each track. The winner is the first player or team to get all three pawns around their independent tracks.

Strategy: As with most trivia-based games, strategy is less important than a wide knowledge-base. Since there is no thematic limitation in regular TriBond, there is no particular advantage to a player with, say, specific historical knowledge or knowledge about literature or movies (note: obviously this is not true when speaking of the many topic-specific reprints and expansions, such as 'Bible TriBond'). When picking teams, it is therefore wisest to choose as broad a range of team-mates as possible. The strategic component of this game is primarily in deciding which pawn to move, and particularly when to initiate challenges -- if you know that another team tends to blurt out answers faster than your own, for instance, one might well wish to avoid challenges altogether. However, the joint effect of winning a challenge on a roll of three or better is actually more significant than any single die-roll could be, so it is often worth the chance to attempt to send the opponent back along the track. This is also true if an opponent is within a few spaces of their winning 'home' square, since they need not reach the square by exact roll.

Components: The components are similar to those found in most American boardgames produced for the family market, including a sturdy cardboard playing board, some 300 cards in the base set printed on moderately stiff cardstock, and so on. It should be noted that, unlike the attractive emerald and purple board, the pawns are printed in quite garish neon colors, and are very lightweight to boot, making it very easy for them to shift out of position or fall over if the table is bumped (as often happens during party games).

Remarks: TriBond is a better than average party game, but it is even better as a travel-game. Whether one chooses to keep score on a track (paper and pencil work just fine for recording positions) or not, the cards provide just the right sort of self-contained puzzle which doesn't distract even the driver of the car from the business of the road. While most of the clues are straightforward, and can be very quick to solve, there are a number of more challenging threezers scattered through the set, and occasional real leaps of lateral logic (what do Don Johnson, Oakland Bay, and guitar solos have in common? Bridges!). Particularly given the thin-ness of the gameplay, and even the low production values of the components, this may be another case where the best thing to do with this game is to cannibalize it for the cards and use those as a mental warm-up kit, and then save the shelf-space for something a bit more worthwhile.

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