If you’ve ever wanted to play trivia games but needed to find one appropriate for kids, Geek Out! Family Edition from Playroom Entertainment and UltraPRO is the game for you. I’ve been playing a lot more board games lately as evidenced by my reviews here on the site and was excited to get a game I could play with my friend and her son.
This edition uses the same great bidding mechanic made popular in the original Geek Out!, but features new topics to keep the game interesting.
What’s in the box?
This version of the Geek Out game includes over 740 topics on 144 list shiny and good quality cards, 20 chips, colored die, a gameboard, and of course instructions.
How does it play?
In the game, you draw cards asking you to list things which fall under a certain category. Before you begin, however, the other players may try to steal your points (and bragging rights!), by bidding to list even more than the card requires. The bidding continues until one player is ready to “out-geek” their friends and family.
Each card comes with five topics and based on which color you roll provides a prompt for the players. In the example below, rolling on yellow means that the players must name books by Dr. Seuss as yellow is words and literature.
Other topics include science and history (red), pop culture (blue), art and music (green), and a miscellaneous category (black). If you roll the blank side, you can pick the category.
As players go around claiming how many they can name from the prompt until you get to the point where everyone else playing says they can’t actually do the number, for example ten Dr. Seuss books. So whoever said ten, now has to name the books and if they can’t do it, they don’t get the card or the point, and instead get a penalty chip worth -2 points. So on and so forth. The first person to get to 5 points wins!
The verdict?
Geek Out! is the kind of game that you either have a ton of fun while playing, or if everyone playing is super nerdy, doesn’t get anywhere because you start fighting about whether obscure answers matter or not, like in prompt “name flavors of soda”. Pedantic (and competitive) people will absolutely get caught up in defining whether an answer matters or not. Plus if you happen to know a ridiculous number of answers to fit the prompt, naming and counting them can get incredibly boring.
One way to get around this problem is by setting a timer for people to actually list off responses. If they stop listing when the timer runs out, they don’t get the point, but if they can keep going up to and past the timer, they get the point. Shoutout to my friend’s fiancé for suggesting this when we all got a bit too chaotic.
What makes this fun though is that it really is accessible for kids as long as they’ve spent any time consuming any media or have spent any time on the internet, which these days feels like every kid. The Geek Out! line also has seven other games including the original, a Big Bang Theory edition, The 00s, TableTop, 90s, Pop culture, and the 80s. The OP even has a Disney version which comes with fun character chips. So there really is an option for every trivia lover.
You can grab Geek Out! from Ultra Pro’s website for $20 and the other games range in price from $12 to $25, which is overall a good value for how many cards come in each game and the replayability.
Images courtesy of UltraPro and Playroom Entertainment
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