Matthew BaileyOn the 9th day of Christmas, my children played with me… Nine Naming words, Eight Hamster homes, Seven toiling train lines, Six locking safe keys… FIVE CARLSBERG CHIPS!, Four Sad Snowmen, Three Magnetic Mazes, Two “Unmatched: Witcher” sets, and a reaction game I played with all three!
“Tilt ‘N’ Shout” is a really simple head-to-head word game where you draw a card that gives you things to name. These might be things such as types of cheese, farm animals, or famous books.
You then need to, one by one, go back and forth naming these things, each time tilting the marble run in an attempt to get the marble to fall out on your opponent’s side. When it falls out on their side, you win a point and move your marker forward by one. This marker actually blocks the tilting mechanism from being able to tilt as much to your side, which slows the marble down and gives a really clever catch-up mechanic to the person who didn’t win the previous round.
Jack really likes it, as he enjoys this kind of game, and we had good fun with it as well, especially because the catch-up mechanic works really well.
Unfortunately, I am going to give some caution before I go ahead and recommend you buy it. Firstly, and obviously, this is a game for two players, and it needs to be reasonably balanced in terms of the ability of the people playing it. With Jack, I went through and got rid of any cards that I knew he wouldn’t know. An example of this was “Oscar-winning films” and “types of car.” You don’t actually get as many cards as I would have expected for this type of game, meaning you will definitely encounter repeats fairly regularly if you play this a lot.
My biggest issue, though, is with the components themselves. It’s such a cool idea, but unfortunately, the quality isn’t quite where it needs to be in order to function as it should. Quite often, when you’re doing this quickly, it’s very easy to slam it down a bit hard, which causes it to hit the bottom and then bounce back up, therefore not being in quite the right place. Equally, it’s very easy to move or shove it while you’re playing, and we even had one situation where, on the lowest setting, even though we were on a flat table, the ball didn’t actually roll all the way to the bottom and got stuck (this is visible in the last photo).
This meant that it almost became better just to play the cards and use a normal timer until someone couldn’t think of an answer. However, that really defeats the purpose of playing the game. It’s a really cool idea and a lot of fun, but it just doesn’t quite work well enough for me to comfortably recommend you rush out and pick this up.
