Hasbro Game Night (Nintendo Switch)

 

A lot of the reviews of this Switch game cover Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, but barely mention Risk because those reviewers hadn’t played Risk. Well, Risk was the main reason I purchased this game, so I’ll aim to spend the majority of this review covering Risk since so few others have.

First thing you should know is that Risk looks amazing. The “board” is a black glass table with colored holographic armies fighting across it, just like you would find in any futuristic sci-fi film you care to name. Second thing you should know is that Risk sounds amazing. The sound effects are perfect, the AI voice (“I.R.I.S.” the Integrated Reconnaissance and Intelligence System) is seductive, and the music fits the game perfectly. (Although once you play more than one game you’ll realize it’s actually just the same single track over and over again, one of the few drawbacks to the game.) What’s even better is that the volumes of all three — the music, the effects, and the narration — are independently adjustable, which is a rare and blessed thing in Switch games.

Third thing you should know is that Risk’s gameplay is amazing. Just like the board game, there are three game options to choose from: 1) World Domination, in which you have to conquer the whole world in order to win, 2) Capitals, in which you only have to capture the countries that have been designated as having capital cities, or 3) Secret Missions, in which you will be told what your specific win condition is — usually this means capturing two specific continents instead of all of them, or eliminating a specific player instead of all of them (but remember that means one of the other players is probably targeting you!).

Next you’ll choose how territories are allocated at the start of the game, which is either Automatic (meaning countries are assigned randomly) or Manual (which is only available if there are 3+ players). Finally you’ll choose how fortifying will work in the game: Contiguous (meaning you can move armies from one of your territories to any one of your other territories so long as there is an unbroken path of connected countries controlled by you) or Adjacent-Only (meaning you can only move armies from one territory to one adjacent territory that you control).

Other settings include a Ceasefire Card that you can turn on or off (which will cause the game to end when it is drawn, to prevent games from going on for hours on end) and deciding whether each separate A.I. player is “Balanced,” “Defensive,” or “Aggressive.” There’s not a whole lot of difference between the first two, but be warned the “Aggressive” A.I.s are VERY aggressive! The game can have up to five players, designated as Yellow, Red, Green, Blue, and White although it would’ve been nice if the game would have labeled them with some random, made-up faction names (like how Command & Conquer had GDI and Nod, or how Dune II had Atreides and Harkonnen and Ordos).

For those who haven’t had much experience with Risk the board game, the L button brings up Tactical advice, i.e. tips on what you should do next. Other helpful features for newer players are that the game will only highlight territories that you can attack from the selected country, and it knows when you can’t fortify and will tell you so. The game will also let you opt to continue watching the A.I.s finish the game if you get defeated before they do.

For more experienced players, it’s worth noting that the Territory “cards” don’t work the way I remember from the board game. Instead of the three icons to collect, the cards each have one or two “stars” (30 of them have 1 star, 12 of them have 2 stars) that otherwise work the same way, i.e. you can trade in X number of stars to get X number of bonus armies at the start of your turn. Strategy-wise, try your best to save these until you have 10 stars which will give you a whopping and intimidating 30 extra armies.

The AI doesn’t cheat, but beware of what I call the “lose/lose/win” round. Oftentimes if you are assaulting a weak territory with a strong army, the game is seemingly rigged so that you will lose your first two battles but win the third. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I’ve played so many games now that I’ve noticed it as a definite pattern. For example, if you attack with 10 armies and the enemy has 2, you’ll roll three dice and the enemy will roll two, and they will win both rolls. So then you’re attacking with 8 armies and you’ll roll three dice and the enemy will roll two, and they will win both rolls. Then, on your third battle, your 6 armies will defeat their two armies. So always be prepared it might take you three battles to achieve what should’ve been a more or less instant victory.

The worst part of the game is that there is one and only one Save slot, so you either have to continue your previous game or override it with a new game. As you play you can also earn “rewards” which tend to be rather pointless (wooden dice, bone dice, cutscenes, production art, etc). And, of course, it is Risk, which means there’s a reason other reviewers haven’t played it. Just like the board game, depending on which options you choose, a game of Risk can go on for two, three, or four hours until all of the other players have been eliminated from the game. It’s kind of like Monopoly in that respect.

Okay, fine, let’s talk about Monopoly. The main problem is, well, it’s Monopoly, widely regarded as one of the worst-designed board games of all time which is why they’ve had to add so many house rules and action cards and speed dice over the years to make it a better game (actually most people don’t know it was intentionally designed to be an agonizing experience to teach people that monopolies are bad, but that’s a story for another time). Putting all that aside, there are a lot of design problems with this Switch version, the first of which — as others have pointed out — is that there is a LOT of completely unnecessary animation in this game that slows it down. For example, when you roll the dice, the dice will knock over the player tokens, houses, and hotels, which the game then has to animate back into place. Why not just have a Dice Tower off to one side of the screen so it wouldn’t have to knock everything about and back? Also, when the tokens “hop” to their destination, they don’t move like a human player would move them (one hop per space), the game always takes 2 to 3 extra hops to get where it needs to go.

The game has three “Living” boards (city, amusement park, and haunted). The color palettes are quite dark, especially the haunted one which is so dark the Reds look like the Fuschias. Because of all the busy animation, the view isn’t zoomed out very far which makes gameplay difficult for those who don’t have the board memorized. Instead of just showing you at all times whether a property is available, or mortgaged, or owned by another player (which the “Classic” board shows), the “Living” boards will “raise” the property up off the board and only then will it show you what you want to know. My advice is to skip the “Living” boards and just use the “Classic” board: it is much cleaner and easier to see and displays useful information at all times without keeping anything “hidden.”

In addition to the overblown animation, the game has an extremely annoying narrator, and also very irritating music. There’s even a weird, muffled “background” vocal track that — if you turn it “off” and then put on headphones/earbuds — you will discover it’s not all the way “off.” You can still barely hear it very faintly which makes it sound like some sort of satanic choir, which should delight conspiracy theorists. Also, if you lose against A.I. players you can’t choose to watch them finish the game like you can with Risk.

After you’ve chosen one of the three “Living” boards or the Classic board or the “Rabbids” board you can then choose one and only one game option: you can either choose Goal & Action cards OR you can choose a House Rule OR you can choose the Speed Die.

You can pick one of five Goal cards to play with the three-per-player Action cards, or you can choose to play with classic rules plus Action cards (i.e. no Goal card). There are 23 Action cards, some of which are helpful but some of which are dreadfully mean-spirited. Be warned that the A.I. players will try to save their Action cards to use against you instead of against other A.I.s. And unfortunately when you bankrupt an A.I. player you don’t get their Action cards which doesn’t seem fair. As for the Goal cards, most of them are fairly reasonable however one of them can end the game in just 10-15 minutes. (When was the last time you heard of a Monopoly game only lasting 15 minutes!?)

If you choose instead to play with a House Rule, keep in mind you can pick only one, like “Free Parking,” or “Snake Eyes,” etc; they can’t be combined. If you want a real challenge, try playing with “King of the Hill” in which you don’t collect any money at all when you pass Go. Also be warned that the “Property Improvements” rule is incorrect: it claims you can build houses without first owning the entire color set (which is true) but it also claims — and I quote — “You also don’t have to build 4 Houses before building a Hotel” — but this is NOT TRUE, you must still build all four houses on the property before building its hotel. They probably meant to say that you don’t have to build four houses ‘on the other properties in the color set’ before building the hotel.

If you choose instead to play with the Speed Die, keep in mind that the irony of the “speed” die is that it claims to make the game go faster, but in actuality it doesn’t. Yes, it speeds up how quickly the unclaimed properties are purchased by teleporting you around the board to the next closest unclaimed property, but after they’ve all been purchased it teleports you to the next property that you don’t own to make sure you have to pay rent to someone, so all the Speed Die REALLY does is just lengthen the already-interminably-long middle phase of the game, which I call the “Small-Bills-Shuffle” phase. The end result is that all of this constant back and forth small-rent trading between players draws the game out to pretty much the same length as a game without the “speed” die.

The other problem with the Speed Die is that if you roll the Bus icon, you can choose to move using just one or the other or both white dice results. However, there’s no way to “pivot” the board view to see where each of the three results would land you, so you’ll have to rely on your memory of which spaces are up ahead when deciding which result to use.

Finally, once you meet certain play/win conditions, you can unlock twelve other game tokens to choose from, which is maddening because they could’ve just made them all available from the very beginning without having to make you “unlock” them. (You have eight to choose from at the start and have to unlock the other twelve yourself.)

Can I say anything good about this version of Monopoly? Well, it does have three Save slots, whereas Risk only has one, and there are multiple language choices, whereas Risk has none. It also has some nice sound effects (like cash registers, bill counters, etc). But they’re not all great — the sound effects at the Robot Factory of the amusement park board are particularly excruciating.

The bottom line is this: if they’d ditched all that overblown animation, they probably would’ve had enough space in the game code to let you combine rules (Snake Eyes plus Free Parking, or Free Parking plus the Speed Die, or the Speed Die plus Action Cards etc). Not only that, they could have included all of those hundreds of “-Opoly” boards that exist in the retail world (all the sports-team-opolies and movie-opolies and tv-show-opolies) in this edition, instead of just the one “Rabbids” board. How cool would that have been!?

And as for the Trivial Pursuit that comes with this title, well, they turned it into a cheesy TV game show format, which is bad enough. What’s worse is that you can’t change the skill levels of the A.I. players. And most inexcusable of all is that you have extremely few avatars to choose from, and a couple of them have some potentially objectionable mannerisms that some might find to be offensive stereotypes.

So the bottom line is that I would definitely recommend this game if you want to play Risk on Switch. And, yes, you can also play Monopoly, but that’s 2 to 3 hours of your life you’ll never get back — do you really want to spend it playing Monopoly? You should instead spend those hours reading Professor Ralph Anspach’s book “The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle” and learn about the true history of Monopoly, which Professor Anspach was able to uncover and prove in court. At the time of this review there are still a couple of copies available from Amazon sellers; if you’re interested you should get one before they’re gone.

 

Great games for the family and helps my young son stick to the rules of the game great for taking on holiday and providing entertainment for all not just one person!

 

Love this game!!! We love monopoly so this is great you can stop /pause at anytime and finish playing when you want which is great when its getting late with the kids or its tea time. Picture quality is great too. Trivial pursuit is also great fun for the family especially when your all competitive. Great you get 3 in 1 games. Haven’t yet played risk myself but my son has and he likes it.

 

So much fun my Son-in-law borrowed it and I haven’t seen it since. We ordered another one 🙂

 

Great game. It is worth getting for multiplayer mode otherwise it’s a long game ahead with bots. Great price as well. If you’re not gonna play in multi mode I don’t suggest the game.

 

We love playing this game with our boys. These family games are always a hi

 

We enjoyed playing the trivial pursuit. Didnt get a chance to play risk as my little one misplaced his game holder. Only thing with the games is they are not playable without the disk. Little gutted

 

I love this. Monopoly was one of my favotire board games growing up. I like the video game version because there won’t be any lost game pieces.

 

This is a great family game. I have a 21 and 16 year old who’s both enjoyed playing this. I would recommend from early teens upwards.

 

Classic board games without all the setting up and putting away. We still play the physical board games sometimes but this is great for when you don’t have as much time or fancy a change.

 

What it says on the tin, as the saying goes.

 

Brilliant value for money for all three games. With Risk and Monopoly being very easy for the littles to pick up. Not a fan of this version of Trivial Pursuit though.

 

Hasbro gaming have made a great game here 3 in 1 and its perfect.. great because I have kids and for a fun easy and no mess you can play board games on the TV. Im so happy that I picked this up. Monopoly as 4 different boards and themes you can pick from plus lots of different rules you can pick from. Risk is very easy to start to play plus learn very easy if you have never played befor. Trivial pursuit is a great 4 player game if you want to see the smartest in the family or just to have a nice tine trying to be the smartest. This is a great buy for anyone with the switch a must buy.

 

Great games. Not your typical board games – much more family friendly and much more fun. Would highly recommend this for a get together or family time.

 

On their own these games are not worth what they ask for them but together for 30 i would recommend anyone to get for their physical nintendo collection. My family sometimes play family games like these around christmas with it being on nintendo should be more fun. I also played a bit on my own with the AI and they still keep you interested. On a side note no micro transaction that i have found yet(hope they don’t do an EA and update with them) and no forced P.C. so you can enjoy it as pure entertainment.