Saturday Morning Gaming: Games for Math Club Kids vs. Games for Theater Kids

I realize that I spend most of my time talking about either single-player game experiences on the computer or board games for crazy people who are looking for the weird or obscure board game experience. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time talking about games that are good to play with the friends who are familiar with Monopoly or Pictionary but not anything much weirder than that.

I mean, most of the board games I play are games for gaming groups who see games like D&D as “entry level” and have a target audience of the types of people who go to the gaming store and immediately exhale and think “I’m back in my element” rather than people who walk in and say stuff like “there are this many board games?”

On top of that, the majority of board games that target people who don’t play games that often are also games that are appropriate for kids to play and the ones that aren’t are games that talk about, ahem, Adult Content (and by that I mean “sex”).

There just aren’t *THAT* many G-rated or PG-rated games for mature audiences that don’t play games that often. One Night Ultimate Werewolf strikes me as being a game that might be good for this audience… Um… I can’t think of that many other ones.

Well, I was recently gifted a game that fits this audience. It’s got rules that take only a few seconds to explain, it’s simple enough that people who don’t play games that often can immediately get into the groove, and, quite frankly, may allow them to shine.

The game is “Debatable“.

In this game, you’re pretending to be a politician who is arguing for a particular viewpoint *BUT* there are strategy cards that you must follow or else you automatically lose.

You have two minutes to give a speech on the topic and you have to follow the strategy. Well, *BOTH* strategies. You draw two.

Strategy cards include rules like “use music references” and “resort to personal attacks” and “use business references” and “the room is bugged” and “use baby voice”. There are about 100 cards that have strategies on them and each strategy card has four strategies on it. So, like, you’re not going to have two of the same strategies in the same speech for tens of thousands of games.

You have a moderator and the moderator receives a Yes! and a No! card and then draws a debate card topic that has five debate topics on it. The moderator picks the topic, reads it aloud, and picks which of the players get the Yes! and the No! card. And then the 2 minute timer is flipped.

Debate topics vary. There are literally hundreds. From “Should animal breeding be illegal without a permit?” to “Should doping be allowed in sports?” to wacky topics like whether Herminone should have ended up with Harry to serious topics where people could really start arguing for realsies (like questions that talk about racism or the death penalty or gun control).

And so the person under the gun might find themselves having to argue against the presumption of innocence in courts by blaming celebrities at the same time as appealing to their horoscope. Then their opponent has to argue for the presumption of innocence in courts by pointing out that nothing matters because of zombies and also blaming children.

Now, I admit, it’s probably not a particularly good game for the gaming group that plays every Saturday night. But if you’re looking for a game that has a target audience of theater kids instead of the kids who can put on a blindfold and tell the difference between a d10, d12, and d8 in less than a second, this one will have everybody laughing. Well, so long as you force people to follow the strategies.

And, heck, might give a little bit of vocabulary for the next time that a debate happens on the television. “Man, he drew a couple of bad strategies, there…”

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is a close-up of the box art. Photo taken by the author.)