Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck If... Game

Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck If... Game

Wow! Jeff Foxworthy made a board game?! ...Wait, who? Wikipedia informs me that Jeff Foxworthy is a comedian famous for "You might be a redneck if..." one-liners and also for being the host of "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?". Also, he kinda looks like my dad.

So anyway, this game. Each player moves their comically drawn redneck character around the board of old tires with the goal of collecting all six redneck necessities from around the board and finally returning to your own trailer. These necessities (a recliner, TV, hound dog, jerky, flyswatter, and satellite dish) are all available for pickup at key locations around the board such as "Uncle Junior's Recliner Liquidator" and "the Mother-in-Law's trailer". The person with the reddest neck goes first (yes, it's in the rules) and there you go. That premise and the amusing art on the game board and necessity cards are pretty much the only interesting things this game has to offer.

But hold on, I haven't yet explained half of what makes this game ... special. In order to move around the board, you have to try to correctly identify which of three possible punch lines is the original Jeff Foxworthy punch line to a given "You might be a redneck if..." joke. So when it's your turn, another player will read you a "joke" and the possible punch lines. If you get it right, you get to move further than you would otherwise, and the distance moved depends on the joke card that is drawn.

This is the core gameplay, and if you aren't familiar with any of Jeff Foxworthy's jokes, it'll just come down to random guessing every time since each punch line tends to be equally plausible (and unfunny).

That's basically the entire game, but there are a couple more spaces on the board worth mentioning. First are the Dumb Luck spaces. Landing on one of those forces the player to draw a Dumb Luck card containing a silly command like "howl like a hound dog" or something game-related like "return your satellite dish". Even if you land on one of these spaces though, all hope is not lost! After reading the card's command, you get to flip a coin to decide whether you must follow the command or whether you can pass it off to another player. ...Unfortunately, most of the Dumb Luck cards aren't really all that exciting and the spaces are easily avoided.

The final weak attempt at fun this game has to offer is the handful of signpost spaces. These also have instructions for the player who lands on them, but these instructions apply for the rest of the game. Some are easy (go barefoot), but some are obnoxious and easy to forget (talk in a heavy accent). The rules don't list any penalties for forgetting to follow the signs, so I guess if your friend stops talking in a thick accent, you can just shoot them or something.

...And that's it! Essentially it's a Jeff Foxworthy trivia game. If that sounds like your cup of tea beer, then go for it. For everyone else, this is a dull game, devoid of humor and fun, and I highly recommend playing anything else.

Scribbage - Bananagrams before it was cool

(c)1963 - E. S. Lowe Company, Inc.
No, I don't usually review board games.

Are you a fan of Scrabble, but not a fan of Cribbage? If so, I have excellent news! Scribbage has nothing to do with Cribbage and much more to do with Scrabble and similar word games.

The game is simple: players take turns rolling out the letter cubes and then making a single crossword within the two minute time limit. Scores are counted in the same way as in Scrabble (although the point values are different), where letters used in two words are counted twice. Any leftover letters have their point value subtracted from that player's total for the turn. Like in Bananagrams, you can rearrange your words as much as you want within the time limit, but you can't flip the cubes over and must use the letters that you roll. With only thirteen cubes, you really have to make every letter count and use high-scoring letters effectively.

It's like a fast-paced solitaire Scrabble. Yes, technically you can play with other people, but since you have to take turns, other players have to spend minutes at a time just watching the other player make their crossword. ...Then again, I guess I've taken longer than two minutes to make a single word in Scrabble, so maybe that's not a valid complaint. Also, there's a good bit of luck involved since each player will have different letters to work with and may end up with an unusable Q or many low valued letters. This is less of a problem in Scrabble since you can build off of other players' letters, but in Scribbage it's easier to lose from bad luck. That's why I say it's more of a solo game where you challenge yourself to get high scores.

Scribbage isn't that unique of a game, but it preempted Bananagrams as a speed-based word game and one-ups it by having point values to consider in addition to simply forming words. It seems a bit lacking as a multiplayer game, but if you find yourself stranded on a desert island with only Scribbage to play, it should keep you entertained for a while.

For more details, here's the box top (click to enlarge):

The only other post about board games is this home-made Fringe trivia game. You could check that out I guess.

Fringe Trivia - The homemade board game by my dad

Now that the great SciFi series, Fringe, has come to an end, my dad has been bugging me and everyone we know who watches the show to play "Fringe Trivia". I had assumed that my dad found this game online somewhere and I flatly told him that I wasn't interested in playing. Unavoidably, he started setting it up before the series finale, which is when I found out that he made this game himself and that it was no small undertaking. Through my dad's labor of love which consumed an untold amount of lunch hours and company printer paper and ink, I can now present to you "Fringe Trivia". 

How to Play:
Set up the board however you like; the suggested layout is pictured above.

The player who rolls the highest number on the dice moves first. From the start, players can choose which direction around the board they wish to move. When a player lands on a space in a category's set of three, they must answer a trivia question from that category. If correct, they may place a marker of their color on that space. More than one marker can be on each space. To win, you must have ten markers on the board and at least three in one category (these do not have to all be on different spaces in that category). 

If a player is the first to have a marker on each of the three spaces in a category, they will "own" that category. If another player lands on a space on that category, they must remove one of their own markers and replace it with one belonging to the owner of the category. They may then answer a question as usual.

Follow special space instructions as directed.

Questions in Fringe Trivia range from the obvious to the stupidly hard. For balancing issues, spelling errors, questions invalidated by the series finale, or other problems, you can blame my dad, not me. I'll do my best to get the questions, answers, and board spaces uploaded somewhere and link to it here when I get the chance.