Words of Wiz Dumb is one of those party games that can seem rather random when played with children and even a little bit randy when played with adults. It isn’t that the game is intentionally suggestive, it just tends leave itself wide open for risqué interpretation with its open-ended statements. That’s to be expected though from a game that is subtitled ‘A Loaded Questions Game of Questionable Advice.”

In the vein of Faces, Imaginiff, or Quelf, Words of Wiz Dumb features an almost useless board that only tends to give the game a semblance of competition. This is unnecessary as the fun of this or any party game like it is in the laughter that ensues, not in seeing how far you can advance.

In the game, players are given pieces of advice from four different “sages” – Dear Gabby, Mr. Know-It-All, Mama, and the Wise Man. These wisecracks have blanks in them for players to fill in with their own words. Players gain points by correctly guessing the people who wrote the different responses. Some of the responses can be pretty clever, so we added a rule that the judge could also select his/her favorite response and move the writer ahead one square so that more than just the advice judge might be able to move in any given turn.

The winner is determined by the first player who reaches the final square on the proverbial mountain and is able to correctly identify all the advise-givers on a selected prompt. It is almost like the final answer in Trivial Pursuit or the concluding task in Cranium except this one is much more difficult. Because the players learn to change up their answers to try to fool you into thinking they are another player, the odds of getting all the answers correctly connected to the other players (especially when playing with five or six players) is highly unlikely. In fact, when I played with a group of five, we only had one occasion in the whole game when a judge correctly matched all players to their responses, so we agreed that simply reaching the final square first was enough to give you the win.

I was also a bit disappointed to find some typos on some of the statement cards, but then I decided I was asking too much of such tomfoolery.

At first, I expected the game to be similar to Wise and Otherwise – another wise sayings game – but the fact that there is no real answer to any of the statements gives it a kind of Match Game kind of flavor. But with statements to complete like “Wise Man says Stomach full of sweets will leave toilet full of _____” or “Mr. Know-It-All says When you go to the bathroom, be sure to wash your hands and _______,” it reminded me more of the Gene Rayburn 1970’s version of the TV game show Match Game. In fact, Words of Wiz Dumb can become embarrassing depending on the players in the same way that Brett Somers or Charles Nelson Reilly could master the dirty double entendre so deftly.

But it is all in fun, isn’t it? And, as is true with most party games: it isn’t whether you win or lose, but how game you are to play!