Hasbro Family Game Night Preview (Xbox 360)

You sunk my battleship!

This exclamation probably means little to the tech-heavy youth that read TeamXbox.com every day, though the slightly older folk surely know this phrase from Hasbro’s commercial for Battleship: A unique board game that featured plastic pegs, plastic ships and an all-too-easy way to cheat at it. Yes, you could simply move your ship, and get around having said ship sunk, but we won’t bore you with the details on how to win Battleship by following what the Axis Powers did during doubya-doubya two.

Hasbro has pretty much owned the board game business for the past gazillion years. But just like newspapers, books and magazines, manual items such as board games are trailing off in favor of digital devices.

Just like a Kindle replacing novels, the video game console is on its way to replacing board games. Knowing this full well, Hasbro has teamed up with Electronic Arts to create Family Game Night: The e.version of a pastime that has been around for over fifty years.



Battleship is only one of the seven popular board games offered up in Hasbro Family Game Night. Scrabble is perhaps the most well known, whereas Connect 4 is a bit more obscure, but still many a board game maven’s favorite. Yes, this is an all-star board compilation if there ever was one.

Ahhh, Connect 4; the lazy man’s checkers. Connect 4 contains game piece matching made popular in casual puzzle computer games, but it takes place in a wonderfully-designed, vertical plastic board. The goal is to align four of your chips in a row, while your opponent attempts to achieve the same thing. Connect 4 is supposed to be played with some speed, but often times, it turns into a chess match; more figuratively, since each piece can only move in a straight line once gravity takes over.

Also on the more obscure side in Hasbro Family Game Night’s lineup is Sorry! Sliders which takes a concept from the original Sorry! (also included in Hasbro Family Game Night) and turns it into a skill-based board game. Sorry! Sliders is like mini curling for the most part, but in place of heavy stones are game pieces from the original game. There are no funky looking brooms, nor is there ice for that matter, in Sorry! Sliders, but the goal of knocking opponent’s pieces out of the scoring board, with the help of Newtonian physics, is precisely the same.

For those that watch King of the Hill, you’re quite aware that the world’s greatest board game is Boggle. Well, at least according to the world’s greatest mother/substitute Spanish teacher—Senora Peggy Hill. Like Connect 4 and Battleship, Boggle is made unique by the design of the game’s plastic items. A synthetic bubble containing letters of the alphabet allows players to shake the crap out of this Boggle ball, and then beat opponents to spelling out words when the pieces finally come to rest. Just like in Scrabble there will always be some joker trying to make up words, so the same dictionary rules apply. Of course it will be up to the discretion of the game master if “pwned” stands up.

Platform:
Xbox 360
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Publisher:
Electronic Arts
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Developer:
EA Games
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Genre:
Xbox Live Arcade
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Release Date:
Q2 2009
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Game Features:
Offline Players: 1-4
Online Multiplayer: 1-4
Downloadable Content
Online Leaderboards
Online Voice Support
EDTV 480p Support
HDTV 720p Support
HDTV 1080i Support
Widescreen 16:9
Dolby 5.1 In-Game

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