The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Game(tm) is a trivia game based upon the bestselling Worst-Case Scenario books. It's a party game, not a strategy game of any serious design.
Players: 2-4 teams
Age: estimated 6
Playing Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)
The Game Components
The WCSSG comes with a small set of components:
- A playing board
- 4 plastic pawns
- A box of 2-sided cards
- A rulebook
The components are almost universally well manufactured, but poorly designed.
The board is a very simple 43-space track from start to finish. Black line drawings fill most of the yellow board. On the track that winds between them are black and red footprints, which form the "spaces". They're a bit non-intuitive and hard to follow because of the fact that they are drawn as footprints--you end up having to go back and forth between the two footprints, rather than following a linear track, and thus it's easy to lose track.
The plastic pawns are of solid manufacture in 4 colors of plastic--red, white, blue, and green.
The cards are relatively stiff, printed in yellow and black. They're square-edged, but that's pretty standard for trivia games, and is probably OK because you're not holding them in your hands. The cards are very badly sorted at the start. You'll get runs of questions like, "How to Prevent Hypothermia in the Wilderness", then "How to Recognize Hypotermia", then "How to Prevevnt Hypothermia on a Lifeboat" in a set. So, you need to shuffle your cards when you receive them.
The rulebook has one page of disclaimers and legal warnings, one page of artwork, and two pages of rules. The rules probably could have been one page long if the (unnamed) writer has been a little less fanatical about using the trademark "Worst-Case Scenario Survival" every other line. (e.g., "Each Worst-Case Scenario Survival Question Card has one question ...")
The main problem with all of these components is that they're boring. As far as I can tell they only used three colors of ink in the manufacture ... yellow, red, and black ... and used line drawings and amateur layout techniques for just about everything.
The Game Play
A player rolls a die. The person to his right draws a card and reads a question and three answers. If the person answers the question right, he moves forward the appropriate amount. If the player answers the question wrong, the person who read the card move forward the appropriate amount.
Then the next player goes ...
Play continues until someone reaches the finish.
The Game Design
Frankly, the game design is primitive and boring, with no strategy and pretty much nothing going for it but luck. We did have some fun playing the game, but that was mostly related to mocking the game, the questions, and the alledgly correct answers. Here's some of the problems:
High Variance: There's a lot of randomness in the card game. The 1d6 die roll causes a lot of variance in a 43-space game. There's also a wide variety in difficulty of questions (from how you recognize a black widow to specific questions about the treatment of hypothermia). But the worst randomness is caused by who's sitting next to you ...
Stupid Answers: The answers is this trivia game are very badly designed. If there's ever an "old salt" piece of folklore about something, it's in here as one of the answers, and it's almost always wrong. Often correct answers have been choosen that are remarkably stupid or unlikely sounding. I'd have to guess that the really are the correct answers, though many of them totally mystified us, but specifically choosing ones that sound so unlikely just makes the whole answering process that much more hit and miss, which leads to the downfall of the core mechanic ...
Conveniently you have a d3.
--A player describing how to answer the questions
Core Mechanic Limits Player Action: The core problem of the game combines the above two problems. First, it's really hard to choose the correct answers, because of the ways they've been constructed. I think the average person has a better than 1 in 3 chance of finding a totally random answer, but I'd guess it's less than 1 in 2 for the average group. Because of the game design that means you're actually more likely, on average, to move forward thanks to the person to your left answering a question wrong than because you answer one correctly. Not only is that yet another random factor (ie, you do great if a dunce is sitting to your left and terrible if a survival genius is), but it means you don't have a lot of capability to control your own destiny, which is never that great of an idea in a "strategy" game.
Conclusion
Overall I'd consider this game a total waste of money and time. You might have a yuck the first game or two through, but it'll pale quickly.
I bought it and I won. It was money well-spent.
--The owner of the game
The design is mundane and lack-luster, while the gameplay is even worse than such stellars such as Trivial Pursuit. The only redeeming element I can see in this game is that you might enjoy it if you're a big fan of the Worst-Case Scenario books, and even then I suspect you're more likely to read the cards than to play this game.
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