When I first heard about Word Blur, I contacted the founder- Geoff Girouard. At that time, he had about 20 copies of the game. I asked him if he thought it would be a game I could effectively use in my classroom. As a reply, he sent me a copy of the game. I looked it over and put it on the shelf, where it sat for a couple of weeks.

One group of students had finished their assignment and decided to play a game at the end of class. They asked me about Word Blur and I told them to read the direction and let me know what they thought as I didn't really know anything about it. They sat down and read through the rules quickly and started a game. The bell rang and I forgot to ask them how it played. I got my answer when they showed up at lunch to play. My students love to play the game and on Friday it gets played constantly all day long (Friday in my classroom is game day). Students will often take it home over the weekend and they have asked that I order several more copies with my next grant.

Game play is quite easy-roll the die and get one person from each group reads to themselves one word off the game card, of which there are two large decks, then the players who read the card use the clue words on the table to get their partner(s) to figure out what word is being described from the card. The amazing variety of clue words allows for many different approaches to getting partners to guess the word from the card. As all of the groups are trying to figure out the same word, the pressure is on to figure it out quickly.

A typical game is played to 10 points, different words are the cards are worth different amounts of points due to their difficulty, and a game usually lasts about 30 minutes.

I would highly recommend this game, especially if you are playing with a large group of people. It is fun and just about anyone can play.