Wits & Wagers (Xbox 360)

WITS & WAGERS, a downloadable game available through Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service, is based on a trivia board game of the same name, and the two versions are very nearly identical in design. The board game has won numerous awards including 2007 Best New Party Game from Games Magazine. The hook in both games is that you don't actually have to know the answers to any questions to win. Rather, you watch how everyone else responds to questions that, say, get players to guess the weight of the world's biggest sumo wrestler or the number of kilometers of coastline surrounding Canada, then bet on who you think has come up with an answer closest to the truth. Higher payouts are awarded those who wager on answers further from the mean of the player collective. Scores are tallied after seven questions, at which point a winner is named.

While the Xbox 360 version of Wits & Wagers has all of the same basic rules as its real world counterpart, it suffers from a couple of exclusive problems. The first is that it supports relatively few players. The board game is best enjoyed in a large, party atmosphere with as many as 20 participants, but the virtual version is restricted to a maximum of four players in your living room. If you play online, the number of potential players raises to six, but that leads to the next problem, which is that you probably won't know your online opponents. That means your ability to gauge the likelihood of any of your competitors actually knowing what, say, the upper limit of potential barrels of bitumen in the Athabasca Tar Sands might be, is around zero. Playing against computer controlled opponents worsens the problem, since their answers are, by and large, completely random. In other words, the game becomes pure guesswork -- unless you actually happen to know the answers to the questions asked.

That said, if you can manage to get four players together to play the game in your living room (and you have four Xbox 360 controllers -- which won't necessarily be true for many players, since, unlike the Wii, Microsoft's console has few games that even support four players playing on the same system), you'll likely have plenty of fun. Games are refreshingly short -- less than 15 minutes -- and the learning curve is around two minutes. Indeed, players will likely understand the basics by the end of the first round. If nothing else, this inexpensive Xbox Live Arcade game, which costs just 800 Microsoft Points ($10) to download, ought to act as a good introduction to the award-winning board game, which, for the reasons outlined above, is the preferable way to play.

Available on: Xbox 360
Not available online
Genre: Party
Developer: Microsoft
Released on: May 7, 2008
Price: 10
ESRB Rating: E