gamegrene.com

I've been planning (and promising Morbus) to review Cranium for weeks. I was excited about playing the award-winning board game, which came highly recommended by friends and has celebrity endorsements from the likes of Julia Roberts and Naomi Judd. So, then, why no review? To play Cranium, you need at least two 2-player teams. Despite my best efforts at luring friends over with promises of spirits and baked goods, it took several weeks to round up four willing participants.

Richard Tait and Whit Alexander, both former Microsofters, created Cranium in 1998, with the goal of "lighten[ing] and enlighten[ing] people's lives." The game recently won the Toy Industry Association's "Game of the Year" award, beating out Nintendo's Game Cube, Game Boy Advance, and Microsoft's Xbox. If you've had the game recommended to you by Amazon.com, that could be the reason. And it's insanely popular - Cranium sold more copies in its first week than Trivial Pursuit sold its entire first year.

The game itself is a m�lange of Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary and charades - plus some other stuff I've never seen anywhere else, like a sculpting component (the box includes a ball of purple clay that doesn't smell like Play-Doh, but aside from that it's similar). Each team chooses a colored game piece, and you roll a 10-sided die to advance around the board. On each square, the team is required to draw a card and either answer the question or perform the activity on the card, before the timer runs out.

There are four decks of cards: Word Worm, Data Head, Star Performer, and Creative Cat. (My favorite was Creative Cat, but Star Performer was definitely the most entertaining.) Maybe because we're all regular Scrabble players, we found the Word Worm questions pretty easy - they include spelling challenges, and unscrambling words. Perhaps the most challenging category in Word Worm is Lexicon, in which you guess the definition of a word.

Data Head is the trivia part of the game. They included true/false questions, multiple choice, and regular trivia ("Factoids"). Two of us (one a Brit, and myself) had some trouble with the US-centric questions here, so I'll be interested to see if the forthcoming Canadian edition is more Canuck-friendly.

The Star Performer cards have three categories: Humdinger, Copycat, and Cameo. Humdinger requires you to (duh) hum a tune. The fun part here is that these might not be tunes that everyone knows. Despite my best rendition of Elton John's "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road," my partner had no idea what I was humming. When a friend of mine played, she drew AC/DC's "Back in Black" and didn't have a clue how the song goes. The Copycat cards require you to act out a famous person. You're allowed to speak, just not say names or places. And Cameo is just like charades - but maybe a little trickier. More on that in a minute.

Creative Cat cards are the Pictionary ("Cloodle" in Cranium-speak) and sculpting components of the game. One of the categories, "Sensosketch," has a twist - you have to draw the picture with your eyes closed.

With two teams, the game took about an hour to play. The overall consensus was that we really liked the game, and would definitely play again. One obvious drawback is the limited number of cards - it's conceivable that at some point you'd learn tricks that your partner would recognize when you're acting out Zsa Zsa Gabor, for example. Of course, the folks at Cranium are already selling 2 Booster Boxes, for all your Cranium-expanding needs.

One more twist to the game: Some cards are marked with the "Club Cranium" symbol. When a team draws one such card, all teams have to play the card. This could mean that one member of each team is drawing a picture of, say, dreadlocks, for his or her partner to guess. It could also mean that one member of each team is acting something out. When we played, at one point someone drew a Star Performer "Cameo" card that was marked Club Cranium. Each team chose a person to act out the word on the card (I went for my team, and my friend Meredith's date, who we'd just met, was chosen from their team). The word we had to perform? "Missionary." After almost three minutes of unsuccessfully miming churches and prayer and handing out bibles, we looked at each other and shrugged. I lay down on my back, and within about 4 seconds Meredith screamed "Missionary!"

Cranium retails for $34.95. Booster Box 1, which contains 800 new questions, is $14.95, and Booster Box 2, which has 800 new questions PLUS four more tubs of clay. That's a lot of sculpting. The Canadian, Qu�b�coise, and UK editions are also available for $34.95.