Wibbell++ Review

My… Word! What a treat for you we have today. 5 reviews in 1! Crazy times! But is there any other approach you can take for a game like Wibbell++, a box that is more game system than singular game. Coming from the mind of In A Bind designer Bez, you can expect something much cleverer than your first impressions suggest.

Players: 2-15 depending on the game
Time: 2-45 mins, depending on the game
Ages: 8+
Designer: David Brain, Andrew Dennison, David J. Mortimer, Aaron Reading, Behrooz Shahriari, Lewis Shaw, Ian Vincent
Artist: Behrooz Shahriari
Publisher: Stuff By Bez

 

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Coming in a simple tuck box with Bez’s customary hand drawn styling, I’ll forgive you for wondering why you’d necessarily pick this up off a shelf filled with Fantasy Flight’s latest and greatest. And that’s a fair question! It’s well done, but doesn’t exactly reach the standard’s we are used to. Add to that, Wibbell is a word game, a style of game that experience has told me does not sit particularly well with gamers. But first impressions are often horribly wrong and this review will tell you why you’d be wrong to dismiss Wibbell++ so quickly.

Wibbell++ comes with a deck of cards featuring pairs of letters and a patterned border. From these limited elements at least 5 very different games have been created. I say at least 5, as that many have rules included in the box, other games will be released online and owners are encouraged to develop and submit their own game designs! For now though, let’s just focus on the main 5!

Wibbell Review

The game that launched a (insert quantity) of others, Wibbell is the titular game and, in what is certain to become a theme throughout these mini reviews, is disarmingly simple. In it you flip two cards off the deck and race to shout out a word containing at least one letter from each of those cards. Simple! The winner chooses one of the cards to take and puts it in front of themselves, and flips a new card from the deck to begin again but now that winner must also include a letter from every card they have collected in front of them.

This system is stunningly brilliant, even if that brilliance isn’t immediately apparent. So obviously you have a catch up mechanic built in. Winning makes the game harder. But it adds surprisingly strategic decisions. Which card you choose when you do win is important, because the letters on it restrict the words you can make in future rounds, especially in combination with other letters. You might even want to intentionally not say anything if the choice of cards in the centre is bad for you, though it’s rare you’ll consider doing that in practice.

These actually important decisions are layered on top of a word game that doesn’t suffer the usual limitations of such games: that whoever has the most impressive vocabulary inevitably wins. Because this is a game of speed, shorter words are often more effective than longer ones, at least until you’ve built up a few wins. But it never gets ridiculous as after 5 wins you reset the cards, but carry your score foreword. Wibbell is an excellent game, and a great start to the pack.

Rating: Winabell

Grabbell Review

Grabbell is a chaotic race to grab as many cards as possible, with the restriction that the next card you go for shares a letter or a border with the one you claimed most recently. All the cards are just dumped and spread out on the table and it’s a fun free for all for the minute it lasts. The one sting in the tail is scoring, each card is worth one point but whenever you like you can stop collecting and slam your cards down, ending your game and earning a 10 pt bonus. The last player left without doing this gets all the remaining cards, making the final moments a bit more tense than you would necessarily expect! A simple, silly distraction, but a good one!

Rating: Grababell

Faybell Review

Faybell is a story telling game! I told you it was a varied box. The idea is to collaboratively tell a story. You start by drawing five cards and thinking of a two word phrase for each card that starts with the letters on the card. So card RX might give you Red Xylophone and really, shouldn’t there be more stories involving xylophones? These five cards, in order, act as story beats that you must at some point say as part of your story. Objectives if you like. You may have accidentally made life impressively difficult for yourself at this point, but don’t worry, that’s just funnier.

Players take turns adding a sentence to the ongoing narrative, which by the nature of one sentence at a time story telling will swing wildly about even before I tell you about the final rule. At the start of your turn you flip a card, and begin your sentence with a word starting with the top letter (challenging!) and choose a word starting with the bottom letter that the next player must include in their sentence. If you’re anything like me, this becomes an opportunity to make life hell for the player sat next to you as they try to perform the mental contortions necessary to fit that word into their sentence. Which is hilarious when you say the word and even more hilarious when they manage to work it into their sentence well!

Of course, you might be able to behave like an adult when playing and not intentionally make life difficult for everyone else and that’s the great thing about this game. You can make it as simple or as difficult as you like, as ridiculous or serious as you like, to suit your group or the level of intoxication. It’s features just enough rules and restrictions to give it some structure and challenge, to make it a game, but leaves you in the driving seat and that is what makes it great! I don’t even tend to play storytelling or role-playing style games normally.

Rating: Faybellous

Phrasell Review

Phrasell tests your wit and imagination! The idea is to conjure forth phrases according to the cards revealed. One player each round gets to be judge and flips a card, using that to inspire a topic to give the other players some direction. Then two more cards are flipped and everyone else tries to come up with 4-word phrases that use the letters on those cards as initials. So, in response to the example above I received an answer “Ewoks Are Wookie Kids,” which almost made me spill my drink.  As judge you get to pass out the three cards as points to the player you think made the best phrase, or the best two phrases. It’s a simple party game set up which does what the best party games do: let you appreciate your friends’ wit and humour. While not everyone in the board game community will be into this kind of game, it can work wonderfully with those who are.

Rating: Witty-ell

Alphabeticell Review

Alphabeticell is about putting cards in alphabetical order! “Oh great!” you think. How thoroughly tedious. Yet, as usual, there is so much more to this game than meets the eye. You start with a card. That is the middle of your alphabet, and as you add new cards to the line in front of you they must go either furthest to the right or furthest to the left, in alphabetical order. Naturally you choose one letter from each card to count, and ignore the other, and you don’t have to collect all the letters in the alphabet to win. Instead you are racing with your opponents to get 11 cards (not even half an alphabet!) and this is important because it makes Alphabeticell all about risk.

You see only one card will be revealed at a time, with players getting a chance to take or refuse it in player order. How many letters are you comfortable skipping over to get the perfect card? What are your opponents likely to do? What happens if someone takes, and the first player moves round the circle? This is as much about manipulating the player order, especially in the two player game. It is sometimes worth taking a less good card to get first dibs on the next one. Once again, the fact that so many little decisions are buried in here, makes this a treat!

Rating: AToZ-ell

As I said at the start, Wibbell++ is not a box people will necessarily drift towards, and that felt like it might be true of the games too. I consistently approached each new one with the sense that, even though I’d enjoyed previous titles in the pack, that this was one I probably wouldn’t like as much as the others. But EVERYTIME that game proved me wrong! All are wonderfully simple and imaginative and bring out the best in players I played it with. They’re funny, or rather, my friends are funny, and many of these games enabled them to show that off. Or the apparent simplicity of a game surprised me with its hidden depths. None of these games will tax you, but they all offer something a little bit special that I didn’t see until I played.

Wibbell++ deserves your attention. It’s likely that not every game in the pack will be to your tastes, but that still leaves the rest of the pack! This is a game I can see sitting in my back pack for train journeys and random gaming opportunities for ages. Indeed, a recent trip from Derby to home passed in no time thanks to this very game. You need a table for most of them… But maybe someone will soon add a new game that won’t! I have my fingers crossed.

 

Overall Rating: Plus plus

 

My copy of Wibbell++ was provided for review by StuffByBez. You can get hold of a copy direct from them here, where you’ll also find an ever expanding list of new games.