Part two of our review of The Dirt Game

The Dirt Game review, part two

Click here to read part one of this review

The gameplay

The Dirt Game: more fun the more people who play it. It's a party game; don't look for strategy.

The deepest you'll go in thought is in trying to accurately predict who would answer yes or no to a given question.

There's minor bet hedging to be had with the How Many? cards since you can advance by being close as well as by being on the mark. Beyond that, thinking too much will probably just slow down the game, eventually raising the ire of your fellow players, who will proceed to taunt you mercilessly with the information garnered when you answered a question about having sex at work.

Since the rules for each type of card are simple enough, it wasn't much of a momentum killer when someone got confused or asked for it to be read again. We made up a house rule allowing others to vote whether the person answering a trivia question in The Dirt Game would be right or wrong so as to involve everyone in all types of questions.

And in the end, The Dirt Game was over much too quickly for our tastes, fun as it was - this can be remedied by doing multiple circuits of the board.

Pros and Cons

The Dirt Game is definitely a party game in the old sense of the term - easy to set up, fairly quickly paced, and geared towards encouraging interaction and laughter amongst all.

Biggest plus: everyone liked it. I thought for sure we'd play one round and abandon it as either ridiculous or too uncomfortable, but we played several rounds, cracking up with some frequency.

Seeing everyone's answers is fun, but hearing the stories behind them, or the rationales for why people voted the way they did, is even moreso. ("Lauren's from New Jersey, so I figured she *had* to have ridden a mechanical bull." Say what? Lauren's from Jersey?)

It's also very replayable. With over 500 cards (according to the box) and most rounds using maybe 20, the same group of people could pull this out time and again. Adding new folks to the mix multiplies the effect.

The Dirt Game: a fun party game that's over too quickly. A couple of surprisingly big negatives though. First - holy crow, the art director needs to be fired immediately. No one I played this with was certain if the 'distressed' look of the cards, dials, and box itself was on purpose or from printing errors. We're pretty sure it's on purpose, but it makes the game feel a bit cheap.

The die likewise wasn't the best presentation, or quality. The whole table turned into a bunch of interior decorators just to pick at the colors used in the game pieces. Of major complaint: several colors, including those placed right next to each other on the selector dials, were hard to differentiate. Also whoever picked the atrocious olive green used in several places should be shot. Slowly.

The shading on the board made it tough to see the different spaces. Oh, and the box was a pain in the neck to open - the cover fits too tightly.

Also not a good sign (depending on how seriously you take your party games): a full thirty second pause mid-game to watch a pair of cats hiss at one another.

Four people is the absolute minimum to play this game and the more people you have the much more merry it will be. This is a negative if you do not have friends - or at least friends who won't be shy about the types of questions asked.

And finally, as with all 'adult' games, The Dirt Game's biggest positive is potentially a big drawback: remember, its core is a lighthearted exploration of your potentially embarrassing moments. We set a good rule of thumb when inviting people to play - under no circumstances should this game be involved in a first date.

The verdict

Now that I've come clean (har) about my feelings, let me reiterate: the fate of this game is in the cards, specifically whether you'll want to answer them. Not to be played in nunneries, with grandparents (except the really cool ones), or with recent exes. I haven't seen what else is on the prepackaged party game circuit these days, but I'm sure you can do much worse than this risque little romp.