Ben 10 Alien Force Guessing Game

My son has been at that stage for the last couple of years where he has been mad on Ben 10 as most boys his age are. He has owned everything from figures to games, and one game he had for his Birthday last year from a family member was the Ben 10 guessing game.

The game is basically the same as the traditional Guess Who game, except the board is not made up of general faces, it is made up of Ben 10 Alien Force figures. For those of you who are not Ben 10 fans, the aliens in the Ben 10 Alien Force series are different to those in the original Ben 10 series when Ben was just a child. The Alien force version is when Ben is more grown up and has a new set of aliens.

The initial set up of the game is quite painstaking, but once you have done this, you don’t have to do it again. Within the box you get two white plastic board bases, two sets of cards which you have to separate and place in the card holders, and the cards you pick your alien from. It does take some time separating the cards from their cardboard holder and then it can be quite fiddly getting the cards into their plastic holders. Obviously as there are two game boards, you have to do this twice too! Once you have put your cards into the holders, you then simply click the holders into place, making sure that you put the aliens in the same order on both bases as its easier to remember where they are doing this and saves confusion.

You then turn the spare set of cards upside down and each player picks a card and places it in the designated space at the front of their base board, making sure your opponent can’t see which card you have chosen. Your opponent then has to guess what alien is on your card by asking a series of questions to eliminate their aliens until they are left with one. When you eliminate an alien, you flip it down so it is no longer standing. The idea is that you are only allowed to ask questions which have a yes or no answer.

The winner is the one who guesses their opponents alien correctly first by eliminating all their other aliens. As you can tell from the game instructions above, it is basically the same as the standard guess who game, but with a Ben 10 theme. I owned the Guess Who game as a child and I will say that this game isn’t as well made as the original game. The bases and holders are quite cheap and flimsy and I find they don’t flip up and down very easily at all. They sometimes get stuck half way and some become detached from their clips quite easily too which wasn’t a problem I remember with the original game. Having said that, we play the game a lot and no parts have actually broken beyond repair yet so it can’t be that bad I suppose!

I do like how quickly this game can be played. A game is generally over within 5-10 minutes which is great with a child of my sons age as lets face it, they don’t have a great attention span so this is perfect for him as he never gets bored of it. It is only a two player game so it is not really a family orientated game.

I find this game a little hard to play personally as I don’t know anything about the aliens themselves and my son is an expert. Apart from the obvious factors such as colour, number of eyes etc, sometimes my son asks me questions about features that aren’t overly evident on the alien from the picture on the card and we have had issues when we come to the end and he has guessed the wrong alien based on my wrong answers! Not a happy child as you can imagine!

However, the more you play the game, the more you come to realise what your child knows and thinks about the aliens, so I can basically answer yes and no now to the majority of his questions. Due to the age range that this game is aimed at, and the fact that the playing parent will have very little clue about Ben 10, your child will come out with some rather random questions about the aliens, but you just need to be prepared for this and tell your child that you don’t know the answer and to ask another question based more on the looks of the alien.

When finished, the game is easily put away in its original box. It can’t be stored without the original box due to the amount of cards etc which are likely to get lost.

The general price of this game is around £12.00 which isn’t bad value for money when compared to other board games. Although the parts are a little cheap and flimsy, the game provides great fun for a Ben 10 fan and keeps their attention well as well as having a slight educational twist to it as your child really has to use their brain to think of appropriate questioning to win game.

I would say the game is appropriate for children aged 5+. It is certainly not suitable for children younger than this as they would struggle to use the right line of questioning. At this age though, you can really start to encourage your child to use the right questions to get the appropriate answers. The game is probably going to be a bit babyish for children around the 9-10 mark, as by this age they would have grown out of Ben 10.

Overall, this game is really quite fun for Ben 10 fans, but not so great for adults who know nothing about Ben 10. Although the game play is the same, it is certainly not as simple to play as the original Guess Who and can cause a few issues if one player (i.e me!), doesn’t know much about the aliens on Ben 10. However, we do seem to have resolved these issues now and my knowledge of Ben 10 has improved enough to make this game fun for both me and my child. It is simple to set up (after the first initial set up) and is a quick, fun, non messy game to play and for these reasons it comes with a recommendation from me.