Cryptozoic Entertainment ROFL!

We host a weekly games night, and have over 200 games on the shelf. So, I have a pretty good basis for comparison on games I review. ROFL turned out to be a surprisingly good party game. Play is simple, one person, the guesser, draws a card and shows it to the other players, without looking. They all try to communicate the phrase on the card in the fewest characters. As they are figuring out how to write it, they bid for the least characters. The writer who bid the fewest shows what they wrote first, and the guesser has one try to get it right. Then the second lowest bidder, until the phrase is guessed or everyone has a shot. Points are scored and the next person becomes guesser. It's a simple games, but it works. Sometimes there are some pretty impressive guesses. The best I have seen so far, I ran out of time re-writing my hint, and ended up with just "dam" for a "movie" phrase. My friend figured out, somehow, that the phrase was "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" from three letters. I had only bid 6, so he figured it had to be a well known phrase, and that's the most famous "dam" phrase he could come up with.

Good idea which could have been made better with more thought. Lots of unusable movie sayings and others you'd never guess as you've not heard of them. The ones you can use are great but few.

my new favorite party game i have not had this one fall flat yet though i have only played with people that text and use thier phones alot.buy this you will like it! works great with 4-7 players

I’m not really a Twitter guy. I have one, but I rarely check it unless something out of the ordinary happens. A couple months ago, however, I was on the site posting a link to my latest review when I saw a tweet from John Kovalic pop up. (You know, the guy who does most of the art for the Munchkin games? Never played those? Go fix that!) It seems that he had designed a new party game and was looking for people to play it and write up reviews. Now, I have very few delusions of grandeur, but I figured I’d throw my hat into the ring anyway…and they sent me a copy! It’s taken me a while to get around to writing this up and posting it, mainly because you need at least three people to play, but here it is: John Kovalic’s ROFL!The goal of the game is to get your message across in as few characters as possible. Yes, it’s a game for people who grew up texting those annoying abbreviated things like “r u hom?” that have destroyed our ability to spell properly. Since I’m a bookworm, I never allowed myself to sink to those depths, which serves as something of a disadvantage now in playing this game but is a trade I will happily make. Game play goes like this: Everyone is out for themselves, unless you manage to make a team thing work. That could be difficult though. One person shows everyone else (without looking himself) a phrase or message that they have to try and communicate with as few characters as possible. Everyone is equipped with a dry-erase board and marker with which to write, and given thirty seconds to work. At the end of the thirty seconds, the writers take turns showing the guesser their boards starting with the person with the fewest characters so that he can try and figure out the message. The messages can be movie titles, quotes, song titles and/or lyrics, common sayings, almost anything. The result is much more fun than I’m making it sound, I promise….My wife and I both enjoyed it, as did my siblings when we played it at Christmas. My wife took it to school and had the Yearbook class she teaches play it during their party celebrating a deadline they’d met, and I’m told it was “quite a success” with the kids. Will older folks find the same enjoyment? I don’t know. Probably depends on their relationship with their cell phone and the whole texting thing. It’s really ideal for teens and up, as younger kids may have trouble with the concept or some of the references. Some of the cards are mildly ribald, such as asking you to communicate the phrase “Like A Virgin” or “Her Milkshake (Brings All The Boys To The Yard).” Not offensive, I hesitate to even use the word raunchy, but…you may find yourself having an awkward conversation if some of your players are too young.On the whole, this is an easy game to learn, and very fun. I would recommend dispensing with the timer the first time you play, just so people can learn with less stress, but other than that it works incredibly well out of the box. The boards don’t erase perfectly, so you may need to gently wash them or something eventually, (I haven’t tried yet) and I imagine that the dry-erase pens will need replaced someday, but consumable parts in a board game are nothing new–think of the clue sheets in Clue or the slips of paper in Balderdash–my family ran out of both ages ago. You make do and carry on.

ROFL! is a highly entertaining game designed by John Kovalic, of Dork Tower, Munchkin, and Apples to Apples fame. The object of the game is to take a well-known phrase and condense it down into as few characters as possible, using any characters found on a standard keyboard. For example, one of the phrases is "Live Long and Prosper." You could condense that into LLAP, LL&P, or my stepson's favorite: \\ //Some might describe ROFL! as "texting Pictionary" or a "license plate game," but to our family it's been countless hours of laughing around the gaming table. We try to have at least one boardgame night a week, and since its release, ROFL! has been on our table every game session.The phrases come from a wide variety of pop culture, including Television, Movies, Music, Politics/History and other Geekdom. While it can help in figuring out how to condense the phase in the fewest possible characters, you do not have to get all the references to be able to play and have a fun time.ROFL! comes with 170 double-sided phrase cards, so there's no shortage of phrases to play with. The game components, including the board, dry erase boards for each player and markers, are excellent quality.ROFL! is a wonderful social game for the family or a party.

It's a lot of fun to play this with different groups of different ages. We had our older daughter play this with her friends and the answers they come up with and their bids are vastly different than when playing with all adults. It's great to see the kids sometimes coming up with shorter answers than the adults!