First Impression: Dubious!

By W. Eric Martin
December 28, 2007

Publisher: Robot Martini Games
Designer: Peer Sylvester
Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 15-30 minutes
Price: $6
Rules Language: English

Version: Production copy
Times Played: Twice, once with 3 players and once with 5

Dubious! is a small party game from a company that specializes in small: Robot Martini Games, which typically produces short print runs of inexpensive card games that can be played in less than 30 minutes. Designer Peer Sylvester had two other games published in 2007—the wargame King of Siam from Histogame and On Q, an abstract game from HiKu Spiele—and Dubious! is about as distant from those titles in spirit and game play as anything you could imagine.

How to Play
Before the game begins, each player receives a set of three answer cards: Yes, No and Maybe; The Yes card has a value of 2, the Maybe card 1, and the No card zero. One player receives the Guess card, and this card travels clockwise during the game. In each round, the Guesser turns over three topic cards, then invents a question that invites the other players to compare these topics. Sample topic cards include an astronaut, sushi, an unexploded bomb, and a camel; sample questions (from the rules) are “Which would you eat?” and “Which would you take on a date?”

The other players place one of their answer cards face-down by each of the topics. The Guesser then arranges these topics and the corresponding answers in a 1-2-3 order and places the Guess card by one of the topics. The Guesser then reveals all the answers by #1; if the total value of the revealed answers exceeds the number of players, the round ends. Thus, in a five-player game, if three Yes cards and one No card (or two Yeses and two Maybes) were placed by topic #1, the total value of these cards is 6 and the round ends.

If the round doesn’t end, the Guesser reveals the answers by #2 and adds their value to the previous total; if the total doesn’t exceed the number of players in the game (thus ending the round), the Guesser reveals the answers by #3, at which point the round must end.

If the Guesser placed the Guess card by the topic card and answers that ended the round, he scores points: 2 points if the round ended with topic #1, 1 point for topic #2, and 4 points for topic #3. Otherwise, he scores nothing. In either case, the next player in clockwise order becomes the Guesser and starts another round. When the deck of topic cards runs out, the game ends and player with the highest score wins.

Starting with a Yawn
Gavin Schmitt at Robot Martini says that Dubious! was first presented to him under the name Yawn. “The game focused on rating ‘how boring’ players thought topics were, relative to each other. If enough ‘yawns’ were given at one time (or cumulatively), the narrator falls asleep.”

While the game worked, the name seemed at odds with the nature of the game play. “The game had a great vibe to it, which seemed at home in the BS conversations we all have at bars and lounges,” says Schmitt. “We experimented with various questions for ‘the core’ game play (ranging from ‘Eat/Not Eat’ and ‘Date/Not Date’ to ‘Which would you introduce to your mom?’ and ‘Which would cause you the most grief?’), but decided that no one question captured the atmosphere alone. So we retitled the game Dubious! and let the players make their own questions.”

How to Play, Redux
Anyone familiar with party games will recognize that making your own questions can be a recipe for either fun or frustration. Players might fall back on the same question again and again, or they might just stall the game while their brain delivers nothing.

Another possibility is to break the game by asking questions that have obvious answers. For a basketball player, a sneaker and a gas pump, you ask, “Which would most likely hit a three point jump shot?” or “Which would you put on your foot?” or “Which has a part that you’d stick in the gas tank of your car?”

In the three-player game, which came first, all three players hit on this notion immediately and we grew frustrated with the game. In the subsequent five-player game, with me being the only one who had played before, players kept the questions unbiased until the fourth round, when someone asked of sushi, a stack of $100s and a guy sitting on a bench, “Which would you prefer to win in a lottery?” As soon as he launched that question, everyone’s gaming paradigm was instantly rejiggered.

But what’s more, everyone also realized that they didn’t have to answer the quesitons honestly. They could place their answers wherever they wanted, forcing the Guesser to try to determine whether players were being honest or not. Dubious indeed…

Scoring—or Not
While party games often invite a certain amount of psychological, Vizzini-like guessing and second-guessing, Dubious! is so short that players don’t have time to learn how their opponents might react and respond to their misdirection. The deck of topics contains only 33 cards, which means that players are the Guesser only two or three times. (Another oddity relating to the 33-card topic deck is that players won’t be the Guesser the same number of times, so players have to either play partway through the deck again or stop before finishing the deck.)

If players throw answers willy-nilly on any topic, your best choice for the Guess card is to place it on topic #2 since the total will likely top the number of players at that point—but that scores you only one point, which is feeble. (Of course, feebleness might be enough to win depending on the success of everyone else. In the five-player game, the scores were 3-0-0-0-0 because once the first player scored 2 points, no one wanted to settle for the one point.)

“So How Do We Play Again?”
The rules for Dubious! give no clue as to whether players should be less direct with their questions and strictly honest with their answers—yet if players ask leading questions and answer randomly, the game dissolves into randomness. Some players are fine with this type of activity, while others will beg for release.

Adding in more topic cards—60 is the ideal number since it’s divisible by 3, 4 and 5—would allow players more rounds in which to figure out how their opponents play, but doubling the length of a light game might kill its potential for fun.

Some brainstorming among players brought out two other possibilities:

1. Use only one question throughout the entire game: “Which would you lick?” Admittedly this would shorten the game’s lifespan considerably, but for a few rounds this was hilarious.

2. Have the Guesser ask the question before seeing the topic cards. This change prevents a player from gaming the system and often creates more interesting situations when deciding how to order the topics and where to place the Guess card—assuming players are answering honestly, that is. If they aren’t, then your best bet is to choose topic #2 every single time, which is boring.

While I like the idea behind Dubious!, the game itself feels like a work in progress, one in which the rules are still being tested and tweaked to determine how to direct players’ actions within the game. If you play with a group of honest, straightforward souls—I’m thinking of my mother here—then you can play the game as published because people will ask “legitimate” questions and answer honestly. Play with a bunch of gamers, on the other hand, and you’ll likely come to the same conclusion I did: Dubious! lives up to its name.

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Comments:

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I played and wrote the English rules for Peer over a year ago and enjoyed the game as it was, though the title and theme of “Yawn” might not sell many copies.  I have not yet had the opportunity to play the “Dubious” version, which first sounded appealing due to the wide-open nature of asking your own questions, but I can see it breaking down the way you describe. Except I would argue that just about any party game breaks down when players no longer answer honestly.  Players whose goal is to break the game are better off avoiding those types of games. As far as the problem with the questions, another solution would be to have a deck of random question cards.  I suspect that would give the game more of an “Apples to Apples” feel (probably a good thing, judging from that title’s popularity). Otherwise, the original version of the game was much more strategic and better-suited for gamers, with its one simple question ("What is the most boring?"),and 5 (not 3) places to place 4 of your 9 (!) available voting cards. I hope the simplified version will work, though, the way the simplified “Barbarossa” worked for North Star Games (with “Cluzzle"). Posted by Jeff Allers on Dec 28, 2007 at 03:57 AM | #

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