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| The Festival Game copyright: own |
The Festival Game
I run my workplace board game club and was recently contacted about trying out a new Kickstarter game called: The Festival Game and giving it a review. So here it is!
As you can see from this photo this is a 'roll and move' game where 4 groups (you will need more then one person on each team to play) have to collect between 3 and 5 backstage passes and all the items you need to camp at a festival before heading to the main stage and answering a question to end the game. The one with the highest points win the game.
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| The board mid game. copyright: own |
Game play
You start the game with a certain number of camping gear and you can use these to trade for the items you need to complete the game. You can see on the board that every square has a icon which lets you pick up a bottle (bottles are points or can be traded for items), roll again or pick up a Karma card (basically an action card that gives you extra items from the other players or moves you to another area of the board). There is also a Lost/Found square which means you can grab anything that has been discarded (or lost) previously in the game. There are also squares were you have to get everyone a drink and one which gives you a meet card earning you points at the end of the game. Each team has to throw the dice after saying which stage they are going to head towards. When you get to the stage you have to complete the action on the card which involves some form of performance.
Review
I have to admit I find that most people who play board games are fairly introvert so asking them to dance and sing was little more then they might feel comfortable with! If you like Cranium and that sort of family game then this might suit you. We adapted the game so it was just pictionary/humming or charades. Pictionary and humming worked best however only if you knew the thing you were trying to describe! Here is a selection of some of the cards from the Acoustic Stage (you had to pick one to perform for the rest of your team to guess in one minute):
Sure Leonard Cohen and Guns N' Roses are pretty universally known but the rest?? If you google Waking the Witch they were a indie band from 10 years ago. There were more of the former then the latter and again as introverts we are not natural festival goers so it is unlikely that we would have seen these less famous band perform (not everyone but in our fairly diverse group at work none of us had heard of them). Which made it pretty hard to complete the challenge. I fully embrace the fact that it shouldn't be easy but this was too obscure for us and would have involved swapping out alot of cards to make it playable.
Even if you managed to complete the correct backstage passes and collected the camping items you needed then when you got to the Main Stage you were greeted with questions like this:
They are all like this! Again how many people really know the history and technical information about festivals? It was too hard for us and we would need to write different ones to play it again.
It is an active game were you always have something to do and we mostly got around the board quickly, the difficultly of knowing the bands not withstanding. It definitely had alot of potential with some more universal acts or with a more festival loving group. It was fun and could be played quickly or with more breaks if you want.
