Game Kids: Funglish

This holiday season, we’ve been playing a new word game: Funglish.  We found the Hasbro game at Target, with a sticker on the box saying it was available only at Target.  I’m not sure if the game will be distributed anywhere else now that the shopping frenzy has ended!

In Funglish, each player has a turn to get the other players to guess words from a card – which is a common thread in games like Taboo, Guesstures and Pictionary.  The twist with this new game is that you can’t speak or act, but give clues by choosing words from a set of cards and adding them to the easel.

The word cards range from colors (red, blue, white, as well as things like spotty and stripy) to size words (big, fat, long, rectangular), from origins (American, British, African, Asian) to more unusual descriptors (manmade, aquatic, human, edible, living).

The easel has three sections: Definitely, Kind Of, and Not.  The object of the game is to choose from the wide array of descriptive word cards for words to place in the different categories to get the other players to guess the word you’re trying to describe.

This was one of KarateKid’s turns: Definitely metal, big and manmade.  Kind of high tech, rough, pointy, and smooth.  Not electric.

You are allowed to nod or make a little motion with your hands to show the other players when they’re on the right track.  MechDaddy guessed the Statue of Liberty and KarateKid rolled his hands… which led us to figure it out – it’s the Eiffel Tower.

Funglish is a fun word game which, like Apples to Apples, helps level the playing field between kids and adults because there is a specific set of pre-selected words.  It’s a little easier to play with mixed ages than a word game that relies on your own vocabulary, something like Scrabble or Boggle, where older players have a definite advantage.

We played for the first time over Thanksgiving and KarateKid was thrilled to play a word game with his wordsmith Aunt Gwyn!  We’ve played it several times since then and it’s still one of his favorites.  And it’s a game that’s just as much fun for adults as it is for the kids, so it’s a wonderful family game.

In the example above, he’s describing something that is Definitely paper, lovable, and manmade, Kind of pink and white, and Not living, high tech, or edible.  Pink and white paper that’s lovable?  Sounds like a valentine to me!

I think the game is a great way to play with words.  It encourages KarateKid to think about things in a different way – not only by describing an object, but by defining something by what it is not, or by what makes it distinctive.  What’s important about a word?  It’s not important to say that a valentine is not stone, or that it’s kind of small.  He had to choose the descriptive cards that would tell us the most about the target word in the shortest amount of time.

My biggest problem with the game – especially playing it with a 7 year old – is that each word is in a different font.  Some words are hard for him to read at a glance, and he has no hope of reading them sideways or upside-down, so he always has to be straight-on to the word cards and the easel, no matter who is giving the clues.  (Aunt Gwyn also points out that some of the fonts are a little too much, like the stereotypical “Asian.”)

The more we play the game, though, the more he’s becoming familiar with the word cards.  It helps that each category of card is a different color, so if he’s looking for a material word, he looks at the light gray cards, and all the color cards are black.

We really enjoy Funglish.  Let us know if you’ve played it too!