Everyone remembers the board game Twister where you compete with friends to have the best dance moves. What’s that? You’re screaming at your monitor because that’s not the Twister you remember? Hasbro Family Game Night 3 makes ‘interesting’ decisions on how to translate physical board games to the digital realm. The bastardization of Twister is pretty offensive and with Hasbro owning over 50 different board games they could have waited for the at the time already announced Kinect or Move support.
What Hasbro Family Game Night does offer are solid versions of Clue, The Game of Life, and Mousetrap. The versions of Yahtzee and Twister are more questionable additions. Twister as mentioned above turned into a rhythm game set to different generic genre songs. Yahtzee throws out the dice and turns the game into a card game. The card game isn’t bad but promoting the game included as Yahtzee instead of Yahtzee Hands Down is like telling people you included Uno but really have Uno Rush.
Each of the other games are represented as they would be if you were actually playing the board game but each includes a remix version that either is better or worse than the classic offering. For Clue it actually improves the standard game a
lot. The new remix version includes an event dice that is rolled at the beginning of each turn. This can cause you to lose a turn or lock down a room temporarily. The best roll you can get with the event dice is having the killer strike again and eliminate a Professor Plum or Colonel Mustard from the suspect list.
The Game of Life’s remixed version just takes all the fun out of the board game which is accurately represented in the game. The remix edition just has players get farther on the board to win by having positive spaces on the board advancing the player an extra space. Now for Mouse Trap this helps the game become a little bit about skill. Regular Mouse Trap is faithfully recreated here but the game is absolute garbage. To test it, I setup my turbo controller to just hit the A button and I won about half the matches my turbo controller played for me.
The lineup in Family Game Night 3 does not make it worth a full retail price tag. The first two editions included a lot of well represented games, while this lineup butchers two and delivers one of the most mindless board games I’ve ever played. The best way to have a successful board game is to have it be equal parts luck and decision making. When you remove the latter you are essentially just rolling dice blindly. Think about how many games you enjoyed that just involved that.
Pros:
- Remixed Clue is brilliant
- Good presentation
- Yahtzee Hands Down isn’t Yahtzee but still a fun card game
Cons:
- Twister is ruined
- Mousetrap is the most mindless board game of all time
- Lots of loading issues in The Game of Life
Score: 3/5
