ShareThisHere's a look at the best party games of the season:
Word on the Street (Out of the Box, $24.99; 2-8 players; age 12 and older; 20-30 min.) -- Fast, fun and challenging, this lexical tug-of-war is a perfect entertainment for any gathering, regardless of the members' verbal sophistication. Seventeen letter tiles -- basically all the consonants except the rarities -- line up on the middle of the game board. Then your team gets a category and tries to think of an example in 30 seconds; as you spell out your answer, you pull each tile one space closer to your side. Get it off the board and it's yours permanently. The game gets more intense at the end, when there are only a handful of letters in contention and you're suddenly trying to think of a cheese with two K's in its name.
Fast Food (Goliath, $19.99; 2-6 players; age 7 and up; 20 min.) -- As with so many truly entertaining party offerings, the joys of this game of fast reflexes sneaked up on us while we were busy rolling our eyes. Players get dealt a stack of round cards representing burger fixings (meat, cheese, lettuce, ketchup, etc.), then turn them over one at a time. If the new card matches one already on the table, buzz in first and you can add it to your ever-bulging sandwich. But if the new ingredient matches the last one you added -- an all-too-easy matter to overlook -- you lose a point instead. The buzzer is a squishy plastic hamburger that emits a flatulent noise for extra hilarity, if that's what you're into.
Sort It Out (University, $29.99; 2-6 players; age 12 and older; 20-30 min.) -- This one offers an enjoyable new wrinkle on the trivia-game format by asking players to put a group of five things in order by size, chronology or some other measure. The questions are skillfully edited to include both hard and easy judgments in each set -- sure, the Rolling Stones debuted before the Sex Pistols, but was that before or after the Who? There is some unavoidable clumsiness in the presentation (ideally, this game would be played with an overhead projector), but once past that it provides a high-quality brain workout.
You've Been Sentenced (McNeill Designs, $24.99; 3-10 players; age 8 and up; 30-45 min.) -- The manufacturer is trying to sell this as an educational game, but don't be fooled -- it's actually plenty of fun. The equipment is a deck of pentagonal cards, most of them printed with five variants of a single word (e.g., large/larger/largest/enlarged/largely). Each player gets 10 cards and tries to build a sensible sentence using as many as possible -- not always an easy task if you get shortchanged on articles or prepositions. Then try to convince the other players that "You fantasized falling Harpo Marx" is a meaningful sentence. Expansion decks allow for a focus on pop culture, gourmet cuisine or science fiction.
Time's Up: Title Recall (R&R, $19.99; 4 or more players; age 12 and up; 30 min.) -- Time's Up (popularly known as Celebrities) is one of those party games that can be played perfectly well without paying a game company a dime. In the first round, players try to clue a famous name to their teammates using any combination of words and gestures. Then, using the same pool of names -- so that the game depends in part on memory -- you clue again using one-word clues and (in a third round) gestures only. Playing for free simply involves each player throwing a few names into a hat, but having printed cards does make things easier and acts as a nudge to the imagination. In this new sequel to the original Time's Up, celebrity names have been replaced by song, book and movie titles, and the results are just as entertaining.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit the San Francisco Chronicle
