Kalabalik is a Bridget Jones-tier hot mess of a game that straddles the boundaries between card game, board game and party game, then does something funny in each of them. At its core, it's a short and extremely sweet trip round a playing area made up of cards, where you get ahead through your ability – and your willingness – to complete the challenge that your token lands on. Sounds straightforward, right? Haha.
If you've ever been frustrated by your inability to remember the Presidents of the United States, but really like the idea of creating a recognizable melody by blowing raspberries on a willing collaborator's tummy, it's perfect for you. If you can fold a paper airplane that will go further than everyone else's, and stand up and chuck it with your shoelaces tied together, that's fine. If your knowledge of sitcom characters is better than your knowledge of what you do for a living, you need this game. By the end of it, someone else might be wearing your bra. That's just the way it is.
Kalabalik is a Swedish word meaning "uproar" or "hoo-ha" and this game stemmed from an idea to create a board game where the rules are: there are no rules. Except rules help control the fun, don't they? So the few rules you'll have to follow are awkward ones. They're joined by a lot of different challenges, refreshed constantly as the game progresses, that are the either the kinds of things you don't really want to do in polite company, or the kinds of things you've been waiting for an excuse to do in polite company. Throw in a bunch of questions that make you think "how the f... oh actually I do know that lol," and a few confessions for good measure. (You don't actually have to do any of them, of course. This is the 21st century. But if you don't, you're probably going to lose.)
What emerges is the lovingly-designed equivalent of that one party you went to in your youth that everyone still talks about, for all the right reasons, twenty years later. What's more, the amount of time it takes to set up, learn and play is far shorter than the intense period of soul-searching you'll get when you sit bolt upright in bed in 3am, drenched in cold sweat, having remembered that you won by texting the word "MILF" to your boss.
—description from the designer
Humor, Party Game · Roll / Spin and Move
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