Cost: $25.00 From: Crazy Talk, P.O. Box 491160, Los Angeles CA, 90049 Players: 4+ Playing Time: 45-90 minutes Type of game: Party Complexity: 2 Skill level: 7 Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 2.2, Winter 1993
Ever since the phenomenal success of Trivial Pursuit, game manufacturers have been recycling old Victorian parlour games. Using the now familiar paradigm of supplying words, pictures, or what have you on a series of individual cards, these games get repackaged and put on the shelves as the latest adult party craze. Without a doubt, one of the most popular parlour games to be run through this process is Charades. Pictionary, the most popular adult game since Trivial Pursuit, is often called "Charades on paper." With its rules left untouched or jazzed up for the 90's, Charades remains rich fodder for an industry seemingly strapped for fresh ideas. The lastest game to dip into the Charades well is Crazy Talk.
Visually, Crazy Talk was undeniably modeled after Pictionary. Their boxes are about the same size and shape. Their game boards, both trifold, feature a track of virtually identical configurations. They both have the ubiquitous box of multi-category cards. Even the playing pieces are the same: simple cubes of solid colors. Most people sitting down to play Crazy Talk will likely feel immediately familiar with the equipment, which was perhaps the very goal the designers had in mind.
Crazy Talk describes itself as a game of verbal charades, the idea being to convey to your teammates a character and the situation that character is in. The cards in Crazy Talk come in two varieties: Characters and Situations. The Character cards have four categories on them: Fictitious Characters, Historical Figures, Real People (occupations), and Multiple Personalities (grab bag). Each space on the board corresponds to one of these categories. The Situation cards describe a situation in which a character finds himself. These situations range from the ordinary ("while riding on a Greyhound bus") to the unusual ("while having an erotic dream") to the absurd ("when a lima bean becomes lodged in your nose").
Players divide into as many as five teams, with at least two players each. On a team's turn, one player from that team draws one of each type of card. Using the character from the category matching the space that team's marker is currently on, the player must now get her teammates to guess that character and the situation she is in. To accomplish this the player can talk, act, sing, hum, or do anything else at all-- but she can't use any of the words on the two cards. And, of course, it must be done before time expires.
For example, if you needed to convey that you are Tarzan while washing out his laundry, you could say, "Jane, swinging on these vines in the jungle all day made my loin cloth dirty. I'll have to run it through the rinse cycle." Or you could be more descriptive, saying, "Since I am the King of the Jungle it's rare that I need to put my clothes in this machine to clean them." Other clues might require more visual elements to help convey the message.
If a team guesses both the character and the situation correctly, they get to roll the die, move their piece forward, and take another turn. If they fail, each other team gets to guess in turn. If one guesses correctly, they get to roll the die and the turn passes to them. When one team reaches the end of the board they must succeed at one final charade-- this time with all other teams guessing at the same time. When a team on this Finish space is the first to guess such a charade correctly on its turn, it wins the game.
It's important to remember that you're supposed to be conveying a character in a situation-- not a character, then a situation. A number of players in our group found it hard to avoid dividing their performance into two parts, charading the character first and then charading the situation. In my opinion, this weakens the fun. The challenge is to convey the situation and the character at the same time. It's easy to charade Sammy Davis Jr., and it's easy to charade having a baby. But it's more of a challenge-- and far more entertaining-- to do Sammy Davis Jr. having a baby. I suspect most players will have a similar difficulty, and the game really loses something when the characters and situations are acted out serially, rather than in parallel. But your mileage may vary.
The instructions in Crazy Talk are written in a chatty, breezy style, which would be fine if they did their job. Unfortunately, they don't. The rules mention talk about moving backward by the number rolled if a team fails to guess correctly, but it never mentions when that die should be rolled and when the team moves forward. Before the charade, or after? The description given earlier in this review reflects our approach, which was to ignore their movement rules and use the Pictionary method instead. This worked fine for us.
Another minor quibble is that the two types of cards come in the same box, each type on one end of the box facing inwards. It's easy to take cards out-- just grab one card from each end of the box-- but putting them back in after they're used is a pain. A sturdy divider in the box would make this much easier. Again, this is a very minor problem.
Since it would be trivial to play this game without any special equipment, what you're really paying for are the characters and situations the boxed game provides. The characters in Crazy Talk are generally well-chosen, easily-recognized names. The Real People category is the least interesting, consisting entirely of occupations which are often very simple to guess. The situations are a mixed bag. Some are brilliant and delightful, some are absurdly simple and some are way, way out there. The result is a good mix that provides a healthy launch pad for an entertaining evening. As in regular Charades, the fun of the game comes in seeing the clever ways people come up with for conveying their identities and situations. The often bizarre pairings in Crazy Talk amplify the amusement.
Because Crazy Talk allows speech, it's a fairly easy game to play. In fact, in one game one team practically won the game on its first turn. Simple modifications to the rules, such as putting a cap on the number of times a team can charade each turn, are easy fixes. Still Crazy Talk is not recommended for the competetively-minded. As a party entertainment, however, Crazy Talk is a blast.