Trivia games are for me what I imagine they are for a lot of people. Hit and miss. Nobody likes to feel stupid and it’s all too easy for these games to make you feel that way. On the other hand, if they are too easy they don’t feel like a challenge. It’s a difficult balance. CDSK does something different and seemingly so obvious I can’t believe other games haven’t done the same thing. It lets you set your own difficulty.
How does it work?
The basic premise of CDSK is simple. You move your token along a path and the first player to reach the end is the winner. Along the route are squares related to different topics. Whatever square you are on, you get asked a question based on that topic. These are the topics:
Curious – Very precise or bizarre subjects
Delightful – Movies, music and sports
Seasoned – Grown-up stuff, school of life
Knowledge – Science, nature, history, geography
This is where the magic happens. You get told the topic of the question, say…’Star Wars’, and then get asked how difficult you want the question to be. But you should also note that the difficulty number is also how many spaces you move. So do you risk it for a big move and potentially move nowhere? Or play it safe and only move a little? The 1difficulty questions are stuff like, finish the title ‘The Empire Strikes….’, the middle questions are your average level general knowledge on the subject, and the high questions are really obscure stuff.
I really like this system as it’s on the player to decide how much they want to risk, and if they get the question wrong, to a certain extent, they don’t blame the game. That said, I have found some things aren’t 100% balanced. I’ve had a 7 difficulty question which was easier than a 4 difficulty question, etc, but I guess that might be my own random knowledge kicking in. It must be difficult to assess how difficult some questions are when compared to others, so I think they’ve done their best. The system also works well for the categories, as you really might not get on with some of them, so you can aim to move the correct amount of spaces to avoid the ones you dislike. Or, if you get stuck on one, just pick a 1 or 2 question to get off them without much trouble.
The Final Square
There is an issue when it comes to the final square however. When you get to the end you have to answer one final question to win the game. These questions are…difficult, and more than a little frustrating. Things like ‘Put these inventions in the order of which they were invented’, and you are only allowed to hear the list once. They vary wildly and we often found we either got them straight away or were there for so many turns everybody else easily caught up. We ended up house ruling it so you could answer a predetermined difficulty of question from your chosen category, that seemed fair.
The only other thing which is a negative for this game, and it’s a small thing, is that there are no player tokens in the box, you have to supply your own. Is it difficult to find something to represent you? No, anything will do and I’m sure most people have at least a few other board games kicking about, even Monopoly will do! It is a little weird to not include them though, as having tokens styled to match the game is always nice, and you know you can just pick up the box and you have everything you need.
Conclusion
CDSK is a good game. Not a great game, but a solid good game. It is very approachable for all levels and I wouldn’t be worried about introducing it to any playgroup. It has its niggles and the final questions are an issue, but those can be house ruled away. If you like trivia and want to either take things easy or challenge yourself on a wide variety of subjects, then I definitely recommend this game.
