Board Game Review: What Next?

Menacing, cave-dwelling koalas, homicidal maids, self-aware robots? Big Potato Games gave our little family barrels of laughs while we faced dexterity driven mini-challenges and silly jokes.

Cat: This was such a great game for our family. We played each story over about week. It was something we looked forward to after martial arts lessons and soccer practices. We could make a quick a dinner and then settle around a cleared table to bust out the box of adventures.

Because we have a variety of ages amongst the kids, with a 12, 7, and 6 year old, we used a lot of house rules to navigate the mini-challenges. Mostly we allowed more practice attempts to help with the dexterity element. We found that by assigning roles to each of us that it made the game more manageable for littlest members of the family. Push-puck was a huge hit with our 6 and 7 year olds. Our 12 year old narrated the cards and tried her hands at some of the mini-challenges. Spider handled the tower of peril on a side table (little kids are wiggle monsters) so that inadvertent bumping had less of a chance of sending us back to the beginning.

One of the things that really stood out to me was the variety in the mini-challenges. The components provided were versatile and we found ourselves using our surroundings as we played through the game. We used the table, the game box, the puck from push puck, we had to read each other's minds.

Spider: I really liked all of the variety in the game, too. I agree that the way they used components for multiple mini-challenges was really clever. The quality of the components was super great. I was surprised at how chunky everything was almost like the quality was better than what we could have expected. I liked the tongue in cheek humor of the game. The art totally supported the silly vibe. I think it reminded me of childhood in part because of the choose your own adventure style. It was reminiscent of being a child with the creative story telling and props. It's a game that I could imagine wanting to give as a gift to someone to keep the fun alive even though we've played through it.

I imagine that there could be a lot of different roles for people in the game. You could play with little kids and house rules. You could play with drunk adults. You could play with mixed company. The ability to house-rules tweaks to make easier or harder are cool. It was really engaging. I thought that the games provided a great blueprint, you could even make your own expansion.

Cat: I can totally imagine this game for a game-night party with friends our age. The game captured the co-op vibe really well and I really liked when the challenges involved more than one person. It made it really engaging and then not one person had to necessarily take the blame for failing.

Spider: I loved the different aspects like the tower of peril, and the passage of time, the mystery bag of pieces. I did feel that the levels were short, but we were house-ruling it because of little kids. It's almost like you want to mess up a little bit to keep the game going. It seemed weird that if you did really well, the rounds went by really fast.

Playing with young children you have to house rules it, but it becomes too easy. So, I think it would be really fun to play the strict rules book game. I feel like it would be a completely different experience. I could see how it could become uncomfortably tense being the one to lose a mini-challenge.

Cat: The different stories did seem to go by quickly, so perhaps we did allow for too many chances with the littles. However, I think they really enjoyed the challenges and kept focused on the game because they could get called to the front lines as each card was pulled.