Hasbro Family Game Night Hands-On

Hasbro has long been a name associated with a dizzying variety of toys and games, but now some of the more iconic games in its stable are being trotted out on the Wii and PlayStation 2 in Hasbro Family Game Night. Five of the six included games are classics--Boggle, Connect 4, Yahtzee, Sorry, and Battleship--while one is a new game that Hasbro will be releasing this fall called Sorry Sliders. We played the Wii version at a recent press event and got a taste of how some of the games are being adapted for a new medium.

First up was Boggle, the game that challenges up to four players to find words by linking together letters randomly placed in a 4x4 grid. One player begins by shaking the Wii Remote to jostle the letter dice around; when they've all settled in, the lid comes off and the game begins. You select letters in order by pointing at them (or moving your cursor with the D pad) then pressing a button, deselect a letter by pulling the trigger, and register a word with two button presses. If the word doesn't exist or another player has already registered it, it won't count, but valid entries will be recorded on a pad in your corner of the screen. The letters are big and easy to see, but they're not so big that you won't occasionally select the wrong one. The control scheme is simple, and the game captures the frantic word-finding fun of Boggle well.

You can spice thing up by turning on the panic flip, which will jumble the letters up when only one minute remains, or portal cubes, which will switch the first and last letters of every word registered. The latter option can really change the game because words can disappear before you have a chance to complete them. The letter arrangement is also constantly changing, which forces you to act quickly and be aware of the whole board. With these wacky options on top of the solid core gameplay, Boggle actually feels like a great fit on the Wii.

Next, we played a bit of Connect 4, the two-player game of strategic vertical checker placement. The core game is simple and represented well, though it did leave us with an urge to play the actual, physical game instead. There are five power chips that aim to expand the gameplay a bit; some let you destroy pieces already dropped into the grid, while another prevents your opponent from playing a piece in a certain column on his or her next turn. The seemingly random distribution of power chips may limit how strategic you can be, though it does slightly increase your strategic options.

The simpler games we saw, like Connect 4 and Yahtzee, seem better suited to the intriguing Party mode. As described to us, Party mode will assemble a timed game to your specifications made up of quick minigames that capture elements of the six larger games. You might have five seconds to place a single checker in the one column that will complete a row of four or be challenged to roll dice as far as you can. This is Hasbro's bid to capture the fun, accessible, four-player board game action of games like Mario Party, and though we didn't get to see it, it seems like it could be one of the more entertaining modes in the game.

The last game we played, and the only unfamiliar one in the bunch, was Sorry Sliders. Sorry Sliders was accurately described to us as a mix of Sorry with shuffleboard and challenges up to four players to slide their game pieces into a center circle by making a throwing motion with the Wii Remote. The center circle has concentric rings of increasing point values and is constantly rotating. Each round, players take turns flinging all their game pieces into the center, and at the end of the round, they use their accumulated points to move their game pieces along a separate path toward the home area--just like in the board game Sorry. Things got pretty hectic each round because the pieces piled up in the center and players bumped each others pieces around the circle, with power-ups adding even more craziness to the mix. We were entertained, and Sorry Sliders seems like a good addition to the mix.

Hasbro Family Game Night also includes a number of rooms that are linked to the profile you play under. These are places you can customize to your fancy, using unlockable posters or furniture, and decorating these spaces will probably appeal to someone in the eponymous family. We weren't able to play Sorry or Battleship, but what we did play offered a good bit of entertainment and seemed best enjoyed with a group of four willing participants. Hasbro Family Game Night is slated to ship for the Wii and PS2 this November. We'll have more on the other games and the promising Party mode in the coming months.