Hasbro Family Game Night: Yahtzee

This review was written for the print magazine, where the four Family Game Night games were reviewed jointly in one article. But since our website doesn't allow us to duplicate that structure, you'll see the four games covered here as separate articles with the same body text, but different score boxes at the end. Clumsy, true — but the best that our modest website can manage.

Imagine the envious shade of green that board-game magnate Hasbro turned when Uno — a rival Mattel property — suddenly dominated Xbox Live Arcade. And Scene It? must’ve been just another kick in the teeth. Enough, said EA, stepping in to bring not only Hasbro’s bestknown board games to Xbox Live Arcade, but an entire ecosystem along with it.

Family Game Night (largely translated from the Wii collection of the same name) features a virtual game-room interface that you can customize with unlockable trinkets you’ll earn by playing Connect 4, Yahtzee, Scrabble, and Battleship. The apartment wall not only shows the Hasbro games you own, but all the others EA would like you to buy — and there are already spaces reserved for Boggle, Sorry!, and Sorry! Sliders, and more titles are promised (see sidebar, page 73). Plus, you can create a little mini-game marathon with three online or offline friends, cribbing bits from each title in your collection in a special Party mode.

Stop right there. Whatever you love about Hasbro’s classic stable of games, you will not find it in the joyless Party mode. For Connect 4, you have five seconds to drop a checker and land the winning move. The Scrabble mini-game is nothing more than “shake the bag of tiles.” It’s fast garbage; the whole mode feels like a useless appendage from Family Game Night’s Wii birth that someone forgot to amputate.

Fortunately, the value of this compilation comes not from how EA has chosen to stitch these titles together, but from how easy it is to rediscover these original, simple pleasures on Arcade. Scrabble (which wasn’t on Wii) easily ranks among the deepest and most fl exible board games ever; the cult that follows the crossword-style classic is obsessive for good reason. Yahtzee — a clear-cut and chatty multiplayer game of chance — works very well on Live. Connect 4 seems simple at first, but the strategy can run surprisingly deep. And the backand- forth of Battleship is simply more fun when you don’t have to put pegs in little plastic boats. Simple interfaces make playing a snap: You might remember these games as mere rainy-day escapes, but they’re uncomplicated fun anytime.

That hasn’t stopped EA from including new, optional rules, such as Connect 4’s Power Chips. Throwing in 2X multipliers and pieces that crush other checkers adds randomness…but not depth. However, Yahtzee’s wild dice in Advanced mode make impressive rolls easier, Battleship’s five-shots-at-once Salvo mode speeds up an otherwise-tedious naval battle, and Scrabble’s Bridge Builders turns the crossword game into a lexical drag race. The alternate rules are fun to try; they don’t always help, but they rarely hurt.

All the games sorely need more in-depth on-screen instructions, and we don’t understand why you can’t swap between rule sets without putting the game back on the virtual shelf. But the best part may be the most obvious — you can play these games whenever you want, online or off, against the computer or with friends, and never lose a piece. The sheer convenience sells it, and $10 per title isn’t unreasonable — but nostalgia plays a part, too. Despite a few flaws and one ill-conceived megamix, these games are treated with the respect they deserve at a price we’re willing to pay. We’re happy to see them on Arcade where they belong.