t’s great that you won’t have to clean up the pieces after spending some time with Hasbro’s Family Game Night, but let’s face it—unless you’re playing Axis & Allies, picking up after a board game takes about 10 seconds. What we’re particularly excited about with EA’s upcoming Wii title is that the games are actually a lot of fun. Go figure.
The title compiles a variety of well-known games including Connect Four, Boggle, Battleship, Yahtzee, Sorry! and an all-new game called Sorry! Sliders, which combines shuffleboard and classic Sorry! elements. Rather than overhaul each of the games just for the sake of doing so, EA has wisely decided to tinker with the games in ways that make sense for each title. For example, a Connect Four variation now has players working toward a point total instead of just trying to be the first player to connect four of their colored pucks on the board. Powerups and point multiplayers add new levels of strategy, too, allowing devious players the capability to move an entire row down, destroy surrounding pucks or other various effects. The version of Boggle we played was a frantic head-to-head race to find the words first. When we found ourselves at a loss for words, a hint on the bottom of the screen gave clues like saying the longest word on the board started with “L” and had five letters in it. If those newfangled modes don’t do anything for you, you’re free to play with the original rules, too.
The Wii’s remote is used in surprisingly restrained ways. We shook the letters into play before starting a round, for instance, and rolled the dice in Yahtzee. A party mode presents bite-sized chunks of gameplay, which can be strung into a longer game session. And players earn points for their time that can be cashed in to upgrade the game’s game room setting, adding aquariums and other neat little animated touches.
It would be tough to bring these games to a console and make them completely awful, but we were excited to see just how well they made the transition to the Wii. Look for it this November.