Base price: $15.
2 / 4 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2

Full disclosure: A review copy of Blank Slate Challenge was provided by The Op.

A few of my friends asked me when I was going to get into reviewing video games, and I laughed for a good, long, uncomfortable time. I’d love to occasionally talk about more things on here, but I’m already overwhelmed as a single proprietor as-is. I’m currently doing a deep dive into video game music as a way to stay focused and write while I’m finishing up this review (special shout-out to Xenoblade Chronicles 2 [not my favorite game, though, surprisingly] and Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia for having pretty great soundtracks). I could probably speak to that at length for a long time, frankly. I spent a lot of time cutting my teeth on video game music growing up, but unfortunately, I don’t have the background in music composition to say much more than “that sounds nice”. Maybe I’ll bring it up on the podcast sometime. Oh, that’s actually a good idea. Anyways. Let’s talk about this week’s game: Blank Slate Challenge!

Blank Slate Challenge is another contender in the ever-popular party word game category. Interestingly, this one only plays 2 or 4 players, so I’m hesitant to call it a party game since, generally, I think of party games as supporting 5+. It has the vibe of a party game, however, so I’ll allow it. In the game, you draw a card with a blank on it and you and your partner have to write down two possible things to fill in that blank. You score individually based on matches and then add up your score to get your round score (bonus points if both words match!). You do this for ten rounds. You can play against another team and compare your score to theirs; the highest-scoring team wins! Do you have a partner you’re completely in sync with?

Overall: 8 / 10

Overall, I think Blank Slate Challenge is a lot of fun! I appreciate, first off, that there’s a team vs. team and a cooperative mode, and they don’t really have a ton to do with each other. It’s just two teams playing the game at the same time and then comparing scores. You could buy an extra set of the game and play with four teams, if you want, really. It’s not a problem of scale, but it does work as a great activity if you’re hanging out with a bunch of couples or whatever people in relationships do. The actual core game is pretty fun, here: as I mentioned, you’ve got a blank to fill in with a word of your choice, and like other great word-based party games (Medium, specifically, comes to mind as a similar vibe) your goal is to get your teammate to guess the same thing as you. This usually means zeroing in on popular or common idioms, but things get extremely challenging if you have a diverse group of friends: a lot of idioms and such are learned pretty early on, but if you grew up in different parts of the country, different parts of the world, or different time periods, you may have wildly different phrases for things.

The big problem I have with the game is that you should definitely bring your own paper towels or microfiber clothes to erase the boards each round. I have not seen such terrible erasers in a game in quite a long time. I appreciate the desire to keep costs low, but they largely just smear the ink around unless it’s been dry for a while, and this is a pretty fast-paced game! You’re unlikely to wait several minutes between rounds so that you can get a clean erase on your board. We ended up grabbing cloths out of a nearby copy of Rivages to do the work for us. Unrelated game, but good game. If I take this places with me, I might throw in a small cloth or few paper towels or napkins just to make the cleanup process easier. It’s not a game-ender, but it’s definitely a surprisingly bad quality of an otherwise pleasant game.

Blank Slate Challenge does a nice job otherwise appealing to the growing and popular genre of cooperative word party games. It’s really been around in some form since, I want to say, charades? But recent hits like Just One have really elevated and catapulted the genre in a way that makes me consistently look for fun new things. This is a quick and punchy little game that’s great on the go and the cooperative two-player gameplay sits really well with me. There’s always a round where you compare results and you say “oh, that makes more sense than mine” or a round where you both just write down garbage because you had nothing come to you in a reasonable amount of time. A small timer could help with keeping the rounds smooth, but honestly, it hardly matters. Eventually stuck players just give up. If you’re a fan of word games, you enjoy a bit of a challenge, or you’re looking for another fun cooperative two-player game, I’d recommend checking out Blank Slate Challenge! I’ve had a lot of fun with it.

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