There’s always a bit of a gulf between adults and the kids when you play family trivia games. Smash Down fixes that with a find-the-world game board as well as fun finger pointers to save people from crushing fingers.
Smash Down is a quickfire trivia game for two to four (technically, five) players that features three simple components. Firstly, there’s a deck of 400 questions, secondly there’s the previously mentioned pointers, finally there are four double-sided rectangular boards each covered in words, letters and numbers. Each of these letters, words and numbers have a border on them, so they’re easy to tell apart, however their orientation and location is deliberately confusing.
That confusing, inconsistent location is because you’ll play Smash Down by assembling those cards into a board however you like. This gives some nice variety between plays as you can’t quite memorise all of the answers based on what’s to their side unless they’re in the middle of the board, and you almost certainly can’t do it if the question master occasionally flips one to the other side.
From there, the first player grabs a question card, picks a side and reads off the question. The answer is always somewhere on the board, and the first player to point their pointer at the correct word and exclaim “Smash Down” wins the card. I said above that you can technically play with five players, this would be by either rotating the question master, or having a set one in place. You could also play with more by having somebody sit out or, and I wouldn’t recommend it, ditching the pointers… but that sounds like a good way to get a bruised finger.
Although Smash Down is really, really simple in concept there’s a lot of novelty to it. My favourite thing about it is that each of the double sided cards doesn’t feature a repeated word… This means, somehow, that even though only four sides are in play at once there’s always a correct answer for each of the four-hundred questions. That’s incredibly clever design, and I really appreciate the depth and replayability that it gives to it.
Smash Down is available now from Amazon.
