CDSK

My partner loves a good trivia game, and I’m partial to one myself despite being incredibly stupid.. I was overjoyed to have a review copy of CDSK arrive at my doorstep one day and it’s a game that vows to be approachable with its “How well do you know ___” questioning system. So, how does it play? Does it run into the usual trivia game issues? Would you recommend it? Guess you’ll just have to keep reading…

HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW CDSK?

CDSK, published by Randolph games, asks you questions in 4 categories: C – Curious, D – Delightful, S – Seasoned & K – Knowledge. Cute, but overall don’t necessarily feel directly linked to the questions in their section. You open the box to find that the board folds out of the lid, which I thought was really fun, and despite being bigger than what you’d expect from a travel box, makes the game feel like it would be practical on-the-go. The cards are split into 6 areas nicely laid out in the insert in the box. There are 2 more card sets for final questions ( Hurry Up & Win cards) and special challenges.

Now, if you looked at the board and it’s dark but colourful layout that is akin to snakes and ladders or the kind of game non-board gamers think of when you say “board game”, you’d expect to at least be provided with player tokens to travel the board with! I mean, you’re paying £30 for the game, and every other game in the history of ever has provided you with tokens so obviously there will be…oh. “Each team selects a Playing Piece…there are none included in this box. Find one that best represents your team”. So, ignore what I said about it travelling well. You physically can’t play the game without finding your own token, and it needs to be small enough to fit nice on the spaces. If they made the cards marginally smaller, there is more than enough room in the box to hold cheap cardboard tokens, or something small and simple. For a game that celebrates intelligence, this has to be the stupidest decision I’ve seen in a while.

Quick shout out: Crescent Creations, a North-East UK based 3D printing company, were lovely enough to provide me with a couple small tokens (which are adorable) for free at the North East Tabletop Expo, so huge thank you to them.

The rules are simple, someone from a different team reads out a question card from the category listed on the space that your team’s token is occupying. That question, unless it’s a challenge card or final answer card, is always “How well do you know ___” and you answer on a scale of 1-10. The question asker will then ask the question associated with that number, and if you answer correctly (within their suggested…31 seconds answering time?) , you move forward the same number of spaces as the difficulty of the question. For example, if you said 9 for “How well do you know Movie Musicals”, and you answered the question correctly, you’d move 9 spaces along the board. If you land on a challenge space you get a special question which acts a little differently and usually involves answering multiple quick fire questions and moving 1-2 spaces for each answer.

CHALLENGE: BE CONSISTENT

Outside of the issues I’ve already raised, this game falls short on multiple other fronts.

1) C-ards D-on’t S-cale K-orrectly

The one thing this game sells itself on, the 1-10 scale system, is the main thing this game absolutely sucks at. The questions are all over the place. They are either too precise – “How well do you know Gary Lineker?” – or too broad – “How well do you know the Colour Blue?”. The difficulty is just silly. Here’s a spoiler for the “Night Vision” card. Skip to the next paragraph if you’d like to avoid. On a scale of 1-10 I picked a 3. “Which of the following adjectives relates to vision in dim light: anaesthetic, scotopic, or sub-tropic?”…. Hang on, I said 3! How is that a 3? What was 4? “What colour are the images seen in infrared night-vision goggles?” GREEN! HOW IS THAT A HARDER QUESTION??? (I genuinely thought that would be 1 on the scale). This happened a lot…. like, a lot a lot. Also, pro-tip, if you have a decent pop-culture knowledge always aim for 7-9 in every category, that’s where you’re likely to find the film/tv questions. I might not be able to answer 6 for “How well do you know Pandas?”, but I do know the Kung Fu Panda was played by Jack Black, which falls at number 9…for some reason.

2) Yes, there is technically 2500 questions

The issue with this game is that it boasts that it contains 2500 questions, which is likely correct, (I haven’t counted) but are you seeing most of them? Not really. Each card has 10 questions. The lower end of the scale is mostly avoided because they’re dirt easy and the scale is all over the place anyway so you might just get really lucky and score high. When you loop a category deck, you have a high chance of asking the same question and just remembering your answer. You’re not seeing 2500 questions. And here’s the issue, it doesn’t take long to loop.

I’m not sure if this is exclusive to me, but we kept landing on the C category. We weren’t intending to, we just somehow kept landing there. Pair that with the fact that you start on a C space, and you aren’t waiting long before you’re back round to the top. We made it loop after 5 games (we got a lot of the questions wrong to be fair, but that’s part of it). Although it felt like we barely landed on the other spaces, we made it at least halfway through the other decks too. All trivia games fall victim to this, but I thought given the large number of questions listed on the box that the game would take a lot longer. Apparently not.

HURRY UP & FINISH THIS REVIEW

Is it fun? Sure. Kind of. It’s as fun as any trivia game really. I’d still choose it over any Professor Puzzle game, and I enjoyed it enough to play 5 whole games of it. You’re always going to run out of questions eventually in any trivia game. Would I pay £30 for it? Not at all. £20 maybe. £25 if they had tokens. Would I recommend it? No. All the Big Potato Games are around the same price if not cheaper and make trivia interesting, different and fun. Buy one of those instead.