I Forget I Have A "Board Games" Tag Sometimes

We tried a game called Name 5 on Saturday. You try and get your piece around the board, and when it lands, you take a card. The card has five topics on it, and you have 30 seconds to list five things for the topic which is the color of the space you landed on.

There are also Double Downs, where you have to get five things each for two topics in 30 seconds, though at least you get to look at the topics on the card and pick two. If you succeed, you get to move double your dice roll. My team had someone very good at rolling 5s and 6s, so we let her handle that (I, unfortunately, am a low roller). At one point, we settled on "Mystery Writers" and "Disney Princesses", because my teammates assured me they could handle the latter, and my dad's books have offered plenty of opportunities for me to get acquainted with the former.

So naturally they froze after being told "Sleeping Beauty" didn't count, because that isn't her real name. Time was ticking away, so I had to blurt out "Ariel and Jasmine", which the rest of my coworkers found hilarious. Whatever, we won that Double Down, and the game. Suck failure, freaks!

Anyway, besides the Double Down, there's also an All Play, which isn't really accurate. That space has two colors. Without looking at the card, the team that lands on it has to pick which color they want. One of the other teams gets the other color. One person from each team looks at the card to see the topic, then they tell their respective teams simultaneously. First team to hit five for their topic get to keep rolling. Our team lost our one brush with that when we had "Motown singers/groups", while the other team got "George Clooney movies".

What? I don't know which groups qualify as Motown.

The finally twist in the game is Flip Flop, which taught us a valuable lesson about following the rules. You take the topic, and each team has 10 seconds to name something that fits. It keeps going round until one team can't answer. We threw out the time limit, which was a bad idea when the Flip Flops started lasting 10 minutes. Eventually, teams would just surrender so we could move on. Always follow the rules, kids! Or Iron Man will throw you in a Negative Zone Prison! But only if you're unpopular.

Us ignoring the rules for Flip Flop aside, I think my biggest problem with the game is that if you succeed in naming 5 things in the allotted time, you get to roll again, up to 5 times. With Double Downs, this meant my team had essentially reached the end of the board before one of the other teams even got to go. I understand the idea of sticking to the "5" theme, but in that case, 2 might have been better. That way it'd be less likely to have one team go on a run and essentially eliminate the others from winning.

That's not exclusive to Name 5, though. We played Cranium earlier in the evening, and in that case it was my team that hadn't even gotten to start before another team was at the end challenge.