A couple of months ago, I wrote about how much I love the show Survivor. For my birthday, my family gave me Survivor the Tribe Has Spoken the new card game produced by Exploding Kittens. To be honest I wasn't expecting much. I figured it would just be an officially licensed gimmick game that we would play once and forget about. I could not figure out how they could make a compelling card game of the greatest social strategy game ever.
Opening the box didn't make me any more confident in the game play. All that was there was about 100 cards and a novelty box that had different colored slots in which to put your vote. It was no surprise that some of the cards had pictures of some of the most popular Survivor contestants ever including Cire, Rupert, Sandra, Yam Yam and my favorite Boston Rob. The rest were some action cards that included silly challenges like playing rock paper scissors or holding up numbers with your fingers to see who had the lowest without matching. There were also several immunity idols and a couple of advantages that let you steal votes or block player moves. And of course there are Tribal Council cards so you can vote the other players out of the game. These aren't random as the cards look different so you can tell when one is coming up. The box says the game would take from 30 to 60 minutes.
i sat down and figured we'd rip through this quick and put it away so we could play something more fun. Thirty minutes wouldn't be too long to wait until I got to play something I like like Dropmix!
Nearly two hours later, none of us could stop laughing or talking about the game. It was awesome!!!! I should have known that Exploding Kittens wouldn't let me down.
Why was it so awesome? Well somehow they found a way to turn about 67 action cards into the most conniving game possible. The immunity Idols were such huge game changers and stealing cards from you family felt soooooo good. We fumbled around for the first few minutes just stealing cards and trying to figure out how things worked. And then the first Tribal Council popped up. My daughter immediately said to my wife "We are an alliance". Well duh. This was the least shocking thing ever. They gang up in every game we ever play... and in life. This meant my son and I had to immediately form our own alliance for self preservation. In the least shocking twist ever, my wife and daughter voted for me. Luckily you get two famous contestants to play as so I only lost my Sandra and still had Boston Rob smiling up at me.
Oh but wait. I forgot to mention how Tribals work. before we voted it was like real survivor. People were grabbing each other and running into other rooms to scheme and have private conversations. This is where my daughter and wife decided on voting me and my son and I banded together... for now.
After I got my first vote and only had 1 card left while everyone had two, I immediately secretly turned on my only son. During private conversations I told my wife and daughter that for every vote for the rest of the game I would be voting for my son no matter what. needless to say, I told my son the exact opposite. At one point I even got him to play an Immunity Idol on me to save me while I secretly had voted for him. As one of the last moves of the game, I stole his Immunity Idol right before the last Tribal Council thus ensuring that I would survive to the final tribal. Once our kids were out, my wife and I had to argue our cases as to why the kids should pick us. Surprisingly, it was a tie as my daughter respected my game play enough to actually vote for me. The secret conversations we had and the fun we had stealing and plotting make this one of the best game play experiences of my life.
The only problem now is that we don't know if we can ever top the fun of that first game. But we are going to try!
Has anyone played this? Any other similar games