Taboo: Can you guess it?

My parents had Taboo when I was a kid, I distinctly remember how much fun it was, or perhaps that was the pink rubber squeaky toy. (It’s now purple!)

Now, because of my childhood fondness for the game, and my albeit vague memories, it had been on my list of games to acquire for quite some time.

The game is targeted at ages 13+ and must have a minimum of four people to play. It’s quite simple really, one person from a team picks a card and has to describe the word on the card to their team mate without saying any of the key words listed below the word, before the timer runs out. A person from another team has the squeaker and watches the card to try and catch the person out for saying a banned word.

There are four colours to choose from and everyone reads a word of the same colour. It doesn’t quite specify if there is a difficulty spectrum within the colour choices, so we tried a few different ones. There didn’t seem to be much difference. Honestly, I was a little disappointed. It was just too easy. We were all guessing the words way before the counter ran out, there just weren’t enough challenging ones.

In the new version that I got there is also a dice with pictures on it. The dice adds extra elements to the game, like extra time, or including other teams etc. Unfortunately this really didn’t add much since we were guessing them all anyway.

I guess this is just sometimes the case with childhood games, they are sometimes better in your memory. This game certainly didn’t live up to my expectations. We had more fun with the squeaker than the game!

Hopefully my next review 221B Baker Street will be a lot more fun 😀

-Auburn xx