Dumb questions to ask your friends - Review
Big Potato are back with Dumb questions to ask your friends, another Party Game, this time in a vibrant green box that sits nicely alongside their other productions. As fans of You Can’t Say Umm, the slightly more restrained Dumb questions had a lot to live up to and somewhat succeeds, even if it doesn’t quite manage to ramp up in intensity across each play.
Dumb questions has a heck of a lot of cards and relatively few rules; each round, one person will take on the role of the Guesser, selecting a question category. The other players will take five question cards from the chosen category and select one, each deciding on a single word answer to the question. The Guesser will be given the shuffled cards and the answers decided upon by the other players to try and determine which question card fits the answers.
To do this, they go over the question cards one by one and place them along the Scoring board, rating the likelihood that this question corresponds to the answer provided by their friends and scoring points on a 0-4 scale from Least to Most Likely. It’s all very straightforward, but there’s a decent if simple push your luck aspect to the card flipping – get two similar question cards, and you might lose a point if you place the one that is ’more correct’ in a lower space of the Scoring board. Do you hedge your bet on the 3 if you pull something likely early, or do you push for the 4?
Unfortunately due to the recommendation of a single turn Guessing for each player when there are 6-8 players, someone having a bum round can take them out of the game fairly early. I would have liked to see a more engaging score system, because as it is, player counts of 4-5 are probably the sweet spot in terms of length, competitiveness and overall experience.
Dumb questions Cards are divided into six categories, with some having more than others; Players is the largest, and centres around the players of the game themselves, while others like Famous people or Food are fairly self-explanatory. There’s enough variety in the box to get through a number of games, but if the questions start to become repetitive it’s probably time to find some new people to play with, or put the game back on the shelf for a while.
One initial issue we found was a need to really push some categories to be selected as people tended to ignore Numbers, or Players if the group wasn’t very familiar with one another. It’s also far more preferable to have multiple turns as a Guesser rather than a single chance, so keeping the player count below 6 is recommended unless you’re happy for the game to run an hour or more with far more rounds. The downtime for non-Guessers at higher player counts can stretch a bit and run the risk of some players losing interest before the game is wrapped.
Dumb questions is a solid Party Game for smaller gatherings with close friends, times when you have a few people over and want something that won’t take more than 30 minutes as things wind down. It’s far more sedate than You Can’t Say Umm, which is definitely better suited for 6 or more players, but also far less demanding on players and will appeal to those less inclined to exhibitionism or being fearful of letting a team down.
