Brian Modreski
United States
Thornton
Colorado
-
Hoopla is a game of deep tactics and many subtle…oh heck, no its not. It’s a party game, pure and simple – but a lot of fun!
The gameplay is quite simple. Each player gets dealt four cards, and another pile on 8 cards is set face down. On your turn, you try to get the other players to guess one of the cards in your hand. If they guess right, you put that card in a “completed” pile and draw a new one.
The cards have a photograph of the item being described, which is nice to add a bit of visual effect to the game – and handy if you don’t quite know what the word is!
How do you get them to guess? Well, you roll a die with five different colors on it. Each color corresponds to a different activity. The different activities are:
Word Worm – you get to give single word clues. But, every clue must start with the SAME letter.
Cluedools – you get to draw for clues – same sort of rules as pictionary!
Sound Stage – charades, but you can add sound effects (but no words).
Tweeners – you get to give a single clue in the form of ‘Its bigger than a “______” but smaller than a “______”’. For example, the example clue they give on the box is “Its bigger than a gladiator but smaller than Rome”, with the answer being the coliseum.
The fifth color is wild, and lets you pick the activity you want.
So, if everyone tries to guess your word, how do you win? Well, it’s a cooperative game. You have a timer which starts at 15 minutes. After you roll, you start the timer and try to go fast, stopping the timer when they get it. (Its got a push start/stop button so you can quickly tap it when the clue is guessed). The object of the game is to get through all the cards in the 15 minutes. If the other players can’t seem to guess the card, you can give up and discard it, but you take a card to replace it and a “penalty card” is added to the pile of cards.
The game is a quite enjoyable. The variety of activities means you will rarely be doing the same thing twice in a row, and provides a bit of choice in the game, as some cards are easier to guess with certain activities than others. For example, it could be quite a challenge to act out “Nashville” with a soundstage activity, but much easier with word clues.
It seems to work well with four players – you’ve got enough time to guess all the cards, but success is not assured. I’m not sure how well it would scale as you add more players if you leave the number of cards unchanged – since each player gets 4 cards, it seems like you could quickly have more cards than you would really have time to get through, even with more people guessing. I think it might be good to cap the total number of cards in the game around 24-30 or so.
We also found this a good game for when you have a few people who want to play, but some who don’t. The people who don’t can easily chime in with guesses even if they aren’t giving clues. Since its all cooperative there won’t be any issue with them helping a certain team.
The supply of cards is not huge, but I don’t really see that being a problem unless you play the games many times in a row with the same people.
Overall, I think its one of the best party games I’ve played and highly recommend it!
-
|
|
Posted Tue Jan 4, 2005 9:33 pm