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Playing time: about 20 minutes
Players: 2 to 6
There’s no better time or place to try out a new game than over the Fourth of July weekend at the family’s cottage. So as I prepared for the trip, I threw a couple of games in my bag, fully intending to turn my unwitting family into game-review guinea pigs. My seven-year-old nephew, Nathan, is a game fanatic, so he was a willing target (and despite the fact that the package said this game is for players ages eight and up, my nephew is, of course, a genius, so I knew he wouldn’t have a problem keeping up—and I was right).
Go Wacky! is a fast-paced, high-energy (and even wacky) dice and card game. To start, each player gets four cards (the rest go in a draw pile) and a die that features the same shape in six different colors. Players take turns playing cards that match the color of the top card on the discard pile (always drawing after playing each card, to keep four cards in their hand). But it doesn’t end there. There are also special cards that come with special instructions. For instance, if someone plays an Everybody Go Wacky! card, players have to quickly roll their dice and race to be the first to match the color on the card. The winning player then yells out the color—and gets to keep the card (which, in the end, will count as one point). And if someone plays a Go Wacky! card, all wackiness breaks loose. The player who played the card has to quickly roll his or her die to try to match the color of as many consecutive cards as possible—to collect as many points as possible in the time that it takes the rest of the players to count out “One Go Wacky!” “Two Go Wacky!” … all the way up to “Twenty Go Wacky!”
Once all the cards in the draw pile are gone, players count up the cards they collected—and whoever has the most cards is the winner.
Over the holiday weekend, Go Wacky! got a ton of playing time. My nephew (and even his three-year-old sister, Kaari, who needed a little bit of help) loved the game—and they kept asking to play again. On one rainy afternoon, the adults gathered to play it. And one night, the neighbors borrowed it to play with their kids. The verdict: this is one crazy game. It’s not for the quiet—or the particularly uptight or starchy. It’s a fun game that will have the whole table yelling and laughing (and even forgetting how to count to twenty) in no time.
The game does have a fun-threshold for adults—and after several rounds, it begins to feel a little repetitive, making it time to move on to another game for a while. But the kids (as young as four) could have played all weekend without stopping. It’s wacky fun for the whole family (and the neighbors, too).
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