Hello! Greetings! This is not an ad!

You know if it were, there’d be a lot of flashbang action going on. We’d have GIFs galore and colorful fonts and stuff, and maybe even pictures of our smiling faces. But alas, this is just another edition of Review Party Recommends, the blog segment where we, uh, recommend things to you, our reader (and hopefully listener!).

What is a review if not a recommendation for or against paying money in exchange for goods or services? I guess it can be a place for a funny joke, but either way, we know our way around reviews, thus we know how to recommend something good when we find it.

LOOKIE, A REVIEW GAME!

Y’know, if we were more enterprising, we might’ve had this idea ourselves, but alas, we’ll have to settle for making nerdy references and childish jokes on our podcast (and obviously writing top-notch content on our blog).

SO! A “review game” you say? Well, how does it work, pray tell?

Well pull up a chair and listen here. We’re gonna unbox this bad boy and tell you exactly what you need to know.

Here’s the box again, but FOR REAL:

That’s right, those stars are shimmery and shiny, and really sell the heck out of this.

What? You want to see the back? Fine, fine.

So here’s the gist of how this all works.

You and at least one other review-loving friend sit down and open this box. You take out the cards and shuffle them adequately (that part is hard, I know, but you can do it). You then pick a little pawn to move around the board and place everyone in the center, on the Log In space.

Then you proceed to roll the die, and as you move around the board, you’ll land on a colored space which corresponds to a category of questions.

One-Star Wonders will ask you about one star reviews, Mystery Basket will have you guess what a review is referring to, Facts & Stats will deal with the numbers side of the business of reviews, Historical Howlers will query you on pre-internet reviews, and Fill the Blanks will have you complete a review which is missing a key word.

All of these are multiple choice or true/false, so breathe easy, you don’t need to be a savant. Don’t believe me? Here:

When you get a question right, you keep that card. Lucky you! You’ll want a card of each color (ahem- Five Stars), and then you make your way to a corner to Log Out, where you’ll answer one more question from a category of your competitors’ choosing.

Don’t worry, I didn’t forget. If you happen to roll a ?, you will read the card yourself, carrying out whatever it instructs (swapping or stealing may happen here, watch out!).

And so- you play, you laugh, you look things up to see if they’re true. You relish in the newness of the game (one card I drew said something along the lines of “during the pandemic of 2020…” So yeah).

I wish I could tell you where to get this. Searching for it online, even on the University Games’ website is pretty fruitless, except on their UK site, where it’s listed as “Coming Soon” at time of writing. There are no reviews on Board Game Geek, either, which is very strange. I’d say it’s just because it’s so new, but this was gifted to me, Christmas 2021, and you can see the TJ Maxx label on the box above!

So, I don’t know, give it some time, then search for it? Because while we may recommend this game (and may swipe inspiration from a card or two), we don’t recommend shipping to the US from the UK. Unless we’re being sponsored!

We aren’t.