At a family gathering yesterday, I had a chance to play the Family Feud Kids vs. Parents edition. The game comes with rules describing how the two sides are supposed to split up and play separate rounds, but because I was there, we played normal Family Feud.
Because it's designed to be a family game, all of the questions in both the "Kids" and "Parents" decks have to be family friendly, so we just played from the deck for parents. When an 11-year-old joined one of the teams, only once did I surreptitiously skip over a question that kids wouldn't have any experience with.
The game suffers from the usual problem plaguing recent Family Feud games: The makers just dumped a bunch of survey results into the box and called it a day.
For example: By the end, the kids wanted to simply play Fast Money over and over, so I switched over to the Kids Fast Money cards (each card contains five questions). One of the games had two questions in a row that began with "Name an animal." Two different cards asked, with slightly different wording, for an animal that people ride, each with different point distributions.
Even though the cards were supposed to be played by kids, one of the questions asked (paraphrasing), "Name something you worry about now that you didn't worry about when you were 10 years old." Needless to say, the 11-year-old had trouble with that one. On that very same card, one of the questions asked players to name one of The Wiggles. To no one's surprise, that went over even worse.
The company paid no attention to the number of points available in any given question. I wasn't looking to see whether there were any impossible-to-win Fast Money cards, but there were a lot where the number one answers were mostly in the 20s (we played more than ten Fast Moneys, and only once did a team win). One of the Fast Money questions had only four answers on the card, all of which were worth 18 or fewer points. And then out of nowhere, a question snuck in on a different card where the number one answer was worth 85 points.
The main game cards suffered from the same problem of "way fewer than 100 points are possible" -- not a problem if you follow the game's rules where the winner is the team with the most points, but annoying if you try to use the material to play real Family Feud.
The biggest problem, though, was in the grouping of answers. Or, more accurately, lack thereof. We played a question asking what you should avoid if you're in the tropics -- "mosquitoes" was one answer, "bugs" was a second answer, and "spiders" was a third answer. On a question asking for something that's washed every day, "underwear" and "clothes" were two different answers.
But worst of all... I don't even know what players are supposed to do with this:
