Over the years we’ve played a couple of different board games (and some video games) where the main concept is based around making silly noises, but YaGoBuGi does something clever: It uses one of the most recognisable gaming brands out there, The Sims.
YaGoBuGi is an incredibly simple game based entirely around making noises and measuring risks. The deck is made up of an even split of cards which, you guessed it, say either Ya, Go, Bu or Gi. After a quick shuffle each player takes four of these cards to form their hand and then, well, then you’re away.
Gameplay is as simple as you choosing which of your cards you’re going to read aloud, and in which order, and then reading them aloud. Your job, from this point, is to keep saying your nonsense-phrase until somebody else assembles the same phrase, that or to give up and pivot to a different combination in your hand to make the match. As you can imagine, a lot of the science of making matches comes down to picking out voices or making compromises.
But, there’s a reason to not take compromises and to instead go for the rarer, longer combinations and that’s because you score more points based on the length of your paired word: five points for two words, ten points for three and twenty if you use up all four. Now, there’s only a certain number of cards in the deck (120) and that means there’s only actually enough cards for a very limited (15) number of full-length, 20 point value pairs… add to that the fact that it’s a competitive game, and your opponent can shift to shorter words at any time, and there’s suddenly a lot of reasons compelling you to shift to a shorter, sharper strategy… which can sometimes shift to simply trying to be the loudest at the table.
And, that’s YaGoBuGi at it’s best: It’s loud, it’s silly and it’s surprisingly fast. As I said in the intro, it’s not the most unique game out there, but it is cheap, fun and familiar for anybody who has tinkered with the incredibly long-running The Sims franchise.
YaGoBuGi is available now, you can find it on Amazon.
