Base price: $15.
2+ players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of DaDaDa was provided by The Op.
Okay, this one’s on me, largely. I have no idea when I thought that I was going to get two reviews’ worth of writing done at home during the holidays, and I certainly did not do it. I considered pulling some reviews from my deep well of stored ones, but that’s a bad habit that I really need to only do once a year, tops. So you’re getting the speed round of what I wanted to review, so I played it tonight and photographed it tonight and did all the writing and editing tonight. It’s been a whirlwind. But that’s exciting in its own right, so let’s talk about DaDaDa!
In DaDaDa, you’re about to learn how complicated language is. You have to build an entirely new one, categorize words based on it, and then use that language to guess new words. Even though it sounds simple, you don’t get a lot of buckets to use for your initial categorization, so who knows if you’re entirely sure if RUE means “mammal”, “animal”, or “something you’d find in a home”? Challenging stuff. Will you be able to use the power of language to establish meaning?
Contents
Setup
Almost none. Shuffle the Sound Cards:
Then, shuffle the Image Cards:
Deal five Sound Cards and reveal two, keeping the other three in a pile. Reveal thirteen Image Cards, setting the rest aside for later. You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
This one’s pretty straightforward.
First, you sort the thirteen image cards. Without speaking anything but your new language, place the cards next to the various sound cards (flipping more than the starting two as you need, to a maximum of five) until players mostly agree on placement. Now you’ve categorized existing words based on your language!
Then, choose a player to go first. They draw another card, look at it, and shuffle it into a stack of five also new cards. They reveal all six and say some word from your made-up language. Once they do, you need to guess what their secret image was. Which categories does it match up with? If you guess correctly, it’s a point. If you guess incorrectly, set it aside; two incorrect guesses ends the game.
Move onto the next player so everyone has a chance to be the picker. Once you have, tally up your score (if you care) and debrief; what did all the cards mean? What did you do well? What gaps did you find? Most importantly, have fun!
Player Count Differences
Technically, there are some, just not particularly useful ones. With more players, there are more rounds, and therefore more opportunities to score points. There’s no big player count difference round-to-round though; it’s just a game of languages and rounds. Just be careful you don’t add too many people, otherwise it will get a bit unwieldy.
Strategy
- Flip a few of the Sound Cards early; it helps to have more options for categorizing. You only start with two flipped; that’s too few to really effectively categorize. That said, if you flip five, you’ll get bogged down in details. I usually flip three or four when I get started and work from there.
- Try to group things together at a high level; you’ll need to have the ability to relate cards to each other. Are they all animals? Related to people? Something you can touch? Tube-shaped? Whatever you can get players to agree to goes.
- Establish meaning how you can! You can string together sounds, use intonation to change things up, or even repeat phonemes! There are a lot of ways to use mouth sounds to communicate language without compromising the game’s rules. We have yet to call something the same syllable more than once, but that’s a goal for a later game.
- If you goof, that’s okay! Use that to gather more information. Now you know one of your assumptions about a category might have been wrong. Not fun, but still useful!
- Try not to make your clues too complicated; keep in mind that the other player’s don’t have the same information. You don’t want to lead with a BO-MEEP-POE-RUE or whatever and have players try to guess the pie you’re referring to on the cards. It’s sometimes useful, but that shouldn’t be your go-to move.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- As much as I love word games, I also love language-based games! This is such a fun concept and I haven’t had this much fun playing with phonemes since Dialect, though Dialect made me much sadder.
- That said, for a language game, I appreciate how language-agnostic it is! The players don’t need to speak the same language until the game starts; then you can only use the five noises you’ve been assigned, which is very fun.
- Very simple game as well, once you get the hang of it. You’re just guessing images based off of sounds!
- I love a lot of the silly noises you can make during the game. There are some very good cards in the sounds deck.
- You may also find yourself using some of the silly noises after the game to describe other things. Sometimes it’s a bit catchy; there’s not much you can do about it. I want to play it with more people and see if we can just invent a weird slang term for something.
- It’s a great party name for getting to know people! As long as they’re into it. It’s a bit performance-based (in the sense that you have to make “weird” noises). If everyone’s down for that, this is a lot of fun! If players don’t really want to engage with that kind of vulnerability, that’s also fine.
- I’d be interested to see how this could expand, especially with possible things like alternate phonemes or working with stress on some syllables. Seems like a sound pack would be a no-brainer, and more explicit instructions in the rules about stressing or adding emphasis would be cool.
- The art style is a little bit goofy, which is fun. It’s kind of hand-drawn, which I like!
- The reflection period at the end of the game is always fun; I love seeing how we converged on ideas from completely different interpretations (or not!). A not-annoying debrief session after a game is always great; I love hearing about the highs and lows and how your strategy worked out. Here, everyone’s explaining how they interpreted certain sounds and that’s just silly,.
Mehs
- I still hate square cards. It’s just difficult to know along which line they shuffle, and again, this time, I was thrown off by my expectations.
- Make sure players understand the expectations of the game before they play. This might be the kind of thing that stresses out players that don’t want to perform or sound silly in front of other people. Just always make sure you’re checking in with your game ground!
Cons
- The scoring doesn’t really make … sense? More players are the only way you’ll actually score more points, so game-to-game it’s dependent on your count. I’m not sure why they just didn’t scale it based on player count or give me a number to divide or multiply by. The profound shrug at the end of the rulebook is gently frustrating.
Overall: 8.25 / 10
Overall, DaDaDa is a hoot. It’s very fun to just sit around a table making strange noises at each other normally, but adding in that we want to establish meaning? It’s a linguistic nightmare. I love it. I think it helps that the cards are very silly on purpose, and the image cards cover a wide range of things. You can actually sort them into five distinct categories fairly easily (with some connectivity), but once you’ve done that, your teammates have to guess new words from that old context. It’s exactly the kind of party game a bunch of people who speak different languages would come up with, and it’s very cute. It’s got a Tower of Babel vibe, but without all the stress of actually speaking different languages after the game. So you end up with a fun game for families or coworkers that’s a little silly but helps you learn a lot more about how other people think. I just wish the scoring made more sense. If you’re looking to make the holidays weird and noisy, you want to speak in tongues causally for a bit, or you just like language-based guessing games, you’ll likely enjoy DaDaDa! I think it’s neat.
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