Game Review: Word Blur

By Neil Edge
March 24, 2008

Publisher: Word Blur, LLC
Designer: Geoff Girouard
Players: 3-12
Playing Time: 60 minutes
Rules Language: English

Word Blur is a new party game by independent designer/publisher Geoff Girouard. Take your standard pocket-sized dictionary, shove it in a blender, and hit purée and you’ll have the bulk of the components in this box: 900 teeny-tiny tiles with a single word on each one.

The game also includes a giant bag to hold these tiles; open bag, dump tiles on table – voila, the game set-up is pretty much complete. You also have a deck of cards and a handful of modifier bars that perform modifications on words placed next to the various categories on the bar. Place “Feed” under the “ing” section, for example, and you now have “Feeding.”

Players are separated into teams, and a la Pictionary each round one person on each team tries to get his teammates to guess a word before the other team does. A die roll determines which of the six words on a card the clue givers are trying to get their teammates to guess. The 1s are easiest and worth fewer points, while 6s are the most difficult and rewarding.

To help their team wrangle the word, clue givers select words from the tile pile, place them in front of his team, and use the modifier bar if necessary. Clue givers, who must remain silent, can denote the importance of a word by pointing at it. (Read this to mean frantically pounding their finger into the table on a tile.) Also, you and your teammates are not allowed to peek at the word tiles any other team is using…yeah, right.

Conceptually Word Blur has a pretty cool idea going for it, and it’s easy to imagine madcapped shouting and hysterics. The fun level of this game, however, is extremely dependent on the group you are playing with. I know this is true for a lot of party games, but I feel it’s doubly so with this one.

In many party games, a straggler who isn’t really a game player generally gets swept along on the “fun train”: basking in their unexpectedly clever clay sculpting in Cluzzle; landing that one unique word that no one else managed in Scattergories; and stacking and restacking items in Bausack. The fun of Word Blur comes in having an initial thought about how you want to describe the word, then adjusting that line of thinking as you find varied and usually completely different meanings for the word in the pile of words available. If a person isn’t totally on board with the idea of this game, he can bring the game to a halt or slow it down to a snail’s pace as he just slowly sifts and sifts and sifts and sifts through the tile pile, never finding words that make connections to the clue that he’s trying to give, never looking for alternatives.

The idea of not looking at the other team’s tiles is kind of a hard rule to enforce. It’s way too tempting to divert your eyes once or twice, and everyone seems to do it. I recommend omitting this little rule as in all honesty looking at the other team’s words can cause as much confusion as clarification. In addition, I found that time and time again the opposing team would systematically speak out the words their clue giver was using in an attempt to make something click by actually hearing the words. I suppose that you could try to enforce this rule by hiding your tiles, but unless you plan on whispering or signing your guesses, it’s all going to be for naught. Given that this is a party game, quiet and subdued is not what I’m looking for when I’m with friends.

To sum up, Word Blur is a quick to teach and an easy to play game that will be received very differently by different people. I purposefully tried to get this game in front of different demographics. The more hard-core gamers were very lackluster on it. Typically I can get these types to play and enjoy a good party game regardless, but this one fell flat with them. Something about the methodology of sifting through the tile pile was unappealing to the gamer types, and even with party game mentality they just were not willing to make it fun.

However, with the non-gamer type of people, the game was much more accepted and in truth played in the spirit it was meant to be played. This group was willing to high spiritedly flick through the tile pile and on several occasions fight over a tile that both clue givers spotted at the same time. They frantically tried to figure out which words needed to be modified and how. All of this together generated a lot of fun and excitement. My bottom line: Carefully consider the group you intend to play this game with.

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