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Such & Such Board Game Review

Such & Such Board Game Review
How to Play | My Thoughts | Final Verdict | Comments

How to Play

The players need to divide into two teams with at least two players on both teams. All of the players agree on how many points win the game.

A turn begins with one player from the current team grabbing a card and becoming the reader for that turn. The duty of being the reader alternates between all of the players on a team each round so everyone is the reader the same amount of times. When the reader is ready they turn over the timer and begin reading the clues starting with clue one. The other players on the readers’ team try to guess the correct answer to each question. They can guess as many times as they want. If they get the correct answer a pawn is removed from the corresponding number of the question on the gameboard in order to indicate that the team got the question right. If the team can’t think of the answer they can pass but they are unable to return to the question even if they have extra time after completing question five. When the timer runs out or the fifth question is correctly answered, the round is over.

Unless the team was able to get all of the questions right, the other team now gets an opportunity to answer/steal the questions that were incorrect, were skipped, or were never asked. The reader asks the questions one at a time and the opposing team gets one opportunity to answer the question. The opposing team has only a reasonable amount of time to answer each question.

Each question answered correctly gives the correct team one point. The game ends whenever one of the teams reach the winning number of points agreed upon before starting the game. If one team has had one less turn than the other team, they are given one turn in order to try and surpass the other team.

My Thoughts

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Such & Such is your typical trivia game with a slight twist. Such & Such’s twist is that all of the answers come in pairs. The correct answer to every question includes two different things that are considered a well known pair. For example one question/clue may be “kids’ favorite sandwich” and the answer would be peanut butter and jelly.

Overall the “twist” of all of the answers being pairs is okay. It is not particularly original and really doesn’t change the trivia genre that much. That said, it is somewhat interesting and makes you have to think a little differently than you do in most trivia games. Since every answer is a pair you know that every answer will have two parts to it. This makes the game a little easier since you know you are looking for a pair of items which allows you to eliminate answers that don’t have two parts. On the other hand you need to know both halves of the answer so if you only know one half you can’t score.

Like most trivia games, Such & Such is easy to learn and play. You pretty much just ask and answer questions keeping in mind the fact that all the answers come in pairs. The difficulty of the questions can be a mixed bag though. Some of the cards have three or four easy questions while another card can have five difficult questions where you are lucky to get one or two correct answers. The difference in difficulty was drastic enough that at first I thought one side of the cards was the easy side while the other was the hard side. That is not the case though. The difference in difficulty is disappointing since the better team will not always win. Luck plays a factor in the ultimate outcome since one team may get more  of the easy cards which makes that team more likely to win the game.

Even though there is a pretty significant swing in difficulty on some cards, I would probably consider Such & Such to be on the easier side of trivia games. Unlike in games like Trivial Pursuit where it could take forever to get a correct answer in some of the categories, you generally should do pretty well in Such & Such. Unless you get one of the really difficult cards you should usually get at least two answers right every turn. For the most part the pairs are pretty recognizable. Due to its’ easier difficulty Such & Such would work better as a family game than most trivia games since children above the recommended age of ten should remain competitive with their parents.

The components overall are decent but for the most part are pointless. Honestly all you really need to play the game is the trivia cards and the timer. The gameboard and pawns are only used to keep track of score and which questions were answered correctly. The score could easily be kept on a piece of paper and since there are only five questions it is not that hard to remember which questions each team got correctly.

In addition to the pointlessness of the gameboard and the pawns, I think the sand timer is not long enough. The sand timer is 40 seconds long. With five questions on a card you only get on average eight seconds per question minus the time it takes to read the clue. That is not enough time in my opinion. You need to answer quickly in order to get to all of the questions in time. If you don’t know the answer right away you might as well skip right away since you are just wasting your precious time. I am guessing the game made the timer short on purpose in order to force you to answer questions quickly. I think the game would have been better served though with a 60 second timer since you would have had at least a little time to think out your answers.

Final Verdict

Such & Such is pretty much your typical trivia game. You answer questions and whichever team answers more questions correctly wins the game. The game is far from original but it is not terrible.

Due to being a basic trivia game, Such & Such will not appeal to people who don’t like trivia games. People who like trivia games may or may not like the game. The twist of all of the answers being pairs is somewhat interesting. If you don’t particularly care for the concept or you prefer harder trivia games, Such & Such is probably not for you. If you think the concept is interesting and don’t mind a trivia game on the easier spectrum I think you will enjoy Such & Such. I would try to find a deal on the game though since at the time of writing this review the game can be found pretty cheap online.