A Review by Matthew Baldwin
Though I generally dislike the reviewing technique of comparing recent games to established classics ("It's El Grande light!"), there is simply no way to discuss Cluzzle, a new game by Dominic Crapuchettes, without mentioning the award-winning Barbarossa. Released in 1988, Barbarossa is a Klaus Teuber party game in which players make sculptures out of clay and attempt to identify their opponents' creations. It is quite fun and invariably generates a lot of laughter. But I've been playing less and less of it over the years, as a number of cracks in the game design have made themselves apparent. The largest flaw, to my mind, is that the game requires 45-90 minutes to play -- too long for what it is. The final third of the game often finds the players increasingly uninterested, and you can usually sense the mood shifting from "this is blast!" to "when will it end?" I've used the homebrew variants available Boardgame Geek to shore up Barbarossa, but I've often wished that someone would find a way to overhaul the rules and halve its playing time.
So when Crapuchettes sent me an email saying he had done just that with his new game Cluzzle, I gladly accepted his offer of a review copy. And I largely agree with his assessment: Cluzzle incorporates the good elements of Barbarossa, omits most of the bad, and streamlines everything in between.
Everyone starts with lump of clay, a pad of paper and a pencil, and a card with nine subjects on it; a typical card might have "baseball bat," "shoelaces," "Easter," and six more words and phrases. A "clay session" begins with each player choosing a subject from his card and sculpting a clue from his clay. The key word here is "clue" -- players need not create literal representations (and, in cases like "Easter," couldn't in any case), but may sculpt anything that they think will aid the other players in guessing their subject.
When the sculptures are complete the first two-minute round begins, during which players ask their opponents yes-or-no questions about their clues. "Is it alive?" and "is your subject two words?" are typical questions, and the owner of a clue must answer truthfully and completely. There is no turn order, and any player may jump in with a question as soon as the previous question has been answered. Players will also be spend the round jotting down their guesses as to the other players' subjects. When the timer runs out, no more questions may be asked or guesses recorded.
Afterwards, all players read their guesses, and the owner of a clue announces if anyone has guessed correctly. When a clue is identified the correct guesser(s) and the owner of the clue score points. Clues are retired after being guessed correctly; if no one identifies a clue it is carried over to the next round. The session ends after three rounds, and after three clay sessions the game is over.
The conceit at the heart of Cluzzle is lifted directly from Barbarossa: players gain the greatest rewards for making "Goldilocks clues," those that are neither to easy nor too hard. The number of points a player gains when his clue is guessed equals the round in which it was identified -- one point in the first round, two in the second, three in the third -- but clues that remain unsolved at the end of a session score nothing. Thus, players need not fret if they are poor sculptors, because creating instantly recognizable clues is not the goal. The game instead rewards creativity, both in the clue-smithing and in question asking.
Cluzzle is both considerably less than and a vast improvement on Barbarossa. By stripping the system down to its core, Crapuchettes allows the players to focus on the fun rather than the mechanics, an essential feature of any party game.
One fault Cluzzle shares with its progenitor is that people can occasionally and unintentionally give ambiguous answers to questions -- throwing players off track and irritating them when the solution is revealed -- but this is unlikely to cause serious disagreements when played amongst friends. And there is at least one aspect of Barbarossa that I prefer to Cluzzle. One of the challenges of Barbarossa was devising carefully worded questions that would elicit answers meaningful to you but to no one else at the table; the players in Cluzzle on the other hand, who are allowed to ask as many questions as they wish during the two-minute round, will often blurt out queries the moment they pop into their heads. Barbarossa's system appealed to the gamer in me, but I recognize the trade-off: the elimination of the deliberative element is largely responsible for Cluzzle's reduced playing time. And even this small complaint is unlikely to result in my ever reaching for Barbarossa so long as Cluzzle sits on my shelf.
Some people have expressed misgivings about Cluzzle genesis, calling it little more than rip-off of Barbarossa. I see their point, but don't agree with it. As Teuber's much needed "Barbarossa: Second Edition" doesn't appear to be on the horizon, I can't bring myself to begrudge Crapuchettes for undertaking the task himself, even if he makes a few bucks in the process. Besides, one of the reason game mechanics aren't copyrightable is so they can be freely reused, giving designers the liberty to take older games and improve them. In my opinion, that's exactly what Crapuchettes has done.