Game Review: Cranium Whoonu

By Steve Bennett
July 27, 2007

Publisher: Cranium
Designer: Uncredited
Players: 3-6
Ages: 8-adult
Playing Time: 15 minutes

The Short Review
Cranium Whoonu is a solid, if too-brief, game that is easy to learn and fun to play. It’s good, clean fun for families.

A Brief History
Cranium purchased the rights to a little-known game called Like It or Lump It. It was a game about ranking things from most favored to least. I am the only listed owner for the game in the BoardGameGeek database, and it is only in the database because I added it. That’s how obscure it is.

Obscure or not, Like It or Lump It is my daughter’s favorite game. Kate is a young lady with Down Syndrome. One of her obsessions is making lists of favorites. To give you an idea of her mania, on my birthday she presented me with a sheet where I had to fill in my five favorite restaurants, movies, Christmas presents, songs, games, and sports teams. She saves these things. Then later, if I name a different restaurant on a subsequent list, she’ll call me on my inconsistency. Anyway, Like It or Lump It is a game tailor-made for a person who enjoys ranking favorites. Kate even enjoys pulling out six cards at a time and ranking them as if she were someone else. “Mom likes Cookies, then Disney World…”

When Cranium Whoonu came out, I didn’t feel the need to own it because it so closely resembles a game I already own. Like most of you (I assume), I don’t have unlimited funds or space. Recently, though, I broke down and got it for Kate’s birthday because she has so thoroughly exhausted the card supply in the older game. It was sort of like painting the living room just because it’s time for a change.

The Contents
My edition of Whoonu is in an irregularly shaped tin box. It has a molded plastic insert that perfectly accommodates all of the game contents except the Whoonu envelope (a card sleeve made out of thicker stock). The envelope still manages to fit on top, and the lid seals well, so it’s not a problem. I mention it because such obvious care was taken in designing the insert that I thought it strange that there wouldn’t be a slot for the envelope.

In addition to the Whoonu envelope, the game comes with 300 cards that each name a thing or an activity a person might like. Examples of what you might find on the cards are “coconut,” “flying kites,” and “ghost stories.” The cards could be a little sturdier, but that’s a minor quibble. Whoonu also comes with six sets of colored tokens. The yellow tokens are stamped with a 1; the red tokens are stamped with a 6. Blue, orange, purple, and green make up the values 2-5. The tokens themselves possess an undulating edge (think of a deep-fried corn tortilla) that allows them to stack easily and remain stacked. It’s a nice touch, though I wish they had printed the value of the token in a second color in order to make it easier to read at a glance.

The rules are printed on three pages of a small-format folded sheet. They are illustrated and easy to follow.

Setup
You begin by placing stacks of tokens in the middle of the table. The number of stacks and the number of tokens in each stack is based on the number of players. It’s illustrated in the rules and easy to figure out.

One player is designated as the first active player, known as the “Whoozit.” This player receives the Whoonu envelope.

The remaining players are dealt four cards.

That’s it. You’re ready to start having fun.

Game Play
The object of the game is to guess which of your cards the Whoozit will like the most. From their hands, the players give the Whoozit one card (if there are five or six players) or two cards (if there are three or four players). These cards are put in the Whoonu envelope.

When everyone has given cards to the Whoozit, the Whoozit looks at the cards and ranks them from least favored to most favored. The least favored card is placed face down next to the stack of yellow 1 tokens. The next favored card goes by the 2 token, and so on.

Starting at 1, the Whoozit turns over the card and reads it out. The player who gave the card to the Whoozit takes the token. This goes on until all the cards have been revealed and everyone has taken a token (or two).

This ends the round. The Whoozit passes the envelope to the left. The players all pass their remaining cards to the left. Everyone but the Whoozit draws cards to fill their hands out to four cards.

Play continues in this manner until all the stacks of tokens have been depleted and everyone has been the Whoozit one time. Players add up the value of their chips, and the highest total wins.

The Dynamics of the Game
That’s how to play it, but now you probably want to know how it plays, if you know what I mean.

It plays great.

One of the beauties of Whoonu is that there are no wrong answers. If I’m ranking four cards, and the cards are “libraries,” “the internet,” “Valentine’s Day,” and “pumpkin carving,” and that’s the order I put them in, from best to worst, who are you to say otherwise? I’d rather go to the library than celebrate Valentine’s Day? Yeah. Whereas some games reward knowledge or quickness, this game rewards perception and empathy. If you can tune in to what other people like (and if you get decent cards to work with), you can win.

As with all party games, however, winning doesn’t really matter. Cranium Whoonu is simply a good way to get to know people. And there’s always laughter when you give someone a card that you absolutely know is going to score well, only to see it slip behind things you can’t imagine any sane person liking. As the box says, “You like poodles more than parrots? Whoonu?!”

The fact that you’re playing with only four cards in your hand means there will be times when you think the Whoozit will hate all of your cards. Then you have to choose to give the least noxious card. This can be the source of many good laughs, as well.

Complaints
This is all small stuff.

My first complaint is that the game is over so quickly. Like It or Lump It is quick. Cranium Whoonu is lightning quick. It’s so fast as to seem insignificant, and in the grand scheme of things, it is. But I don’t want it to seem that way while I’m playing. This is easily remedied by playing a second (or third) full game and combining the scores.

The Whoonu envelope strikes me as extraneous. We don’t bother with it. The Whoozit takes the cards, shuffles them up a little and then looks at them. The envelope just adds some motor-skill makework.

The mechanic of passing your unused cards to the player on the left could cause problems when the Whoozit is revealing cards. I know I’ve had to think twice about whether the revealed card came from me or if it was just something I was remembering from having had the card in my hand two turns earlier. One way to take care of this would be to do what Like It or Lump It did: have players keep their own cards and not pass them around. Another way would be to just pay more attention!

On the plus side, passing cards to your left allows you to toss some total garbage on your neighbor. It’s a lot of fun when you see the person’s reaction to three terrible cards, knowing that unless the player draws a good one from the deck to fill out the hand, he or she is roadkill on that turn.

Another difference from the original game is that Like It or Lump It scored 10 for the most liked card to minus 5 for the least liked (or lumped) card. I think Cranium was trying to simplify the scoring and remove the taint of negative scoring. I rather liked the fact that the leader could lose points and be brought back to the pack a little. Of course, that suggests a greater emphasis on the importance of winning than the game probably needs or wants. Still, I liked that element in the original.

Final Thoughts
Cranium Whoonu is a fun game that can be played with family and friends of all ages. It’s not a laugh riot like some games, but we always laugh when we play it. Given how easy it is to learn, how quickly it plays, and how well it plays with mixed age groups, I think it’s a winner you can easily justify adding to your game closet.

I give it a 7 out of 10.

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