December 04, 2013

Oddly Obvious

Imagine the clue to a crossword entry is: "A cow with no legs." Or another clue is: "A turtle without a shell." Any answers come to mind? Would you be confident? When you are solving a crossword, you usually have crossing answers providing some of the correct letters.

But what if there were a game that presented crossword-like clues but the answers were right in front of your face? That's the premise of Oddly Obvious, the second game that we played at Will Shortz's Wonderful World of Words last month. Of the four board games we played, Oddly Obvious was the game I was most worried about. Would having the answers provided render the game too easy for hardcore word gamers?

I needn't have worried. It turns out that having the answers provided led to many laughs, intense time pressure, and even a genuine challenge. The rules are simple enough that you can be up and running within a couple minutes. Oddly Obvious is great fun.

The answers to our puzzlers. A cow with no legs is "ground beef." And a turtle with no shell is "homeless."

Here's a video review with a recommended rule change: