“What would Brian Boitano Do” is not just a song from South Park’s full length film but also one of the Experts you have to beat in “Beat the Expert.”
Brian Boitano is joined by Betty White, Peggy Post, Isaac Newton, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and a host of other people I’ve never heard of who answer a list of topical questions. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to answer the 10 questions on the card and beat the expert by getting as many or more correct.
The game is for 2+ people and is best played in teams. (More on this later.) The game play is as follows:
You get an expert card and the Reader (the oldest person in the game, I guess they are assuming the older you are, the more likely it is you learned to read in school) reads off the card questions to the opposing team. The team guesses the answers within the alloted time measure by the egg timer (about a minute) and if they beat the expert, they progress down to the next expert spot on a playing board.
If they FAIL to beat the expert, then they have a choice of “Did you Know?” to answer (to the left of their current expert spot on the board) or Brain Beaters on the right. The “Did You Know” are little-known, and who-cares facts about one of the experts, so you are pretty much unlikely the first time to get these right. During the game, the Reader reads off some of these facts, so eventually, playing this game, you will learn that Betty White likes rye toast and Brian Boitano has six toes on his left foot (I’m making these up.) After you try to get off the “Did You Care (Know)” square just once, you won’t make that mistake again, and you’ll pick Brain Beater. You have to get three, then four, then five and five right (like Cash Cab’s Red Light Challenge) to progress down the board.
At the end, the first person to get to the final square is then challenged by the other teams to get the most right on the Final Expert Card, a card reserved in a sleeve hiding the answers that is saved for the end game. Beat the guy on the final square and you win. Otherwise, he wins. So just being first to the final doesn’t insure you win. Huh.
Though you can play this with two players, this is best as a party game, although “best” is a relative term, as I don’t like this game very much. It’s best as a team game because you can guess more correct answers, especially on the Brain Beaters and then progress at more than the glacial speed it took us to play one round.
My opinion is that the “experts” are lame, one had an answer wrong that was marked “correct” (yeah, yeah, so sorry, the game says MOOPS, not MOORS) and we found this game to be quite tedious. And it is a stretch to figure out what Isaac Newton did and did not know since he’s been dead for quite some time.
What would Brian Boitano do? Not play this again, and play cribbage, instead. That’s what he’d do. Me too. Go head to head with the experts! For the first time, you can check your wits against more than 40 world class experts like feminist Gloria Steinem, B. continue reading