Players: 3 - 8 Ages: 8+ Game Time: 20-40 minutes
Overview
In Gorilla Marketing, you are primates at an advertising marketing agency. The CEO fired all the human employees, and it's up to you lucky gorillas to name ridiculous things and items and come up with marketing tag lines for them! It is a humorous parlour game designed by Adam Wyse, featuring dice rolling, acronyms, and brilliant wit. The artwork is by Andrew Bosley and Gui Landgraf
COMPONENTS
1 x Rulebook
8 x Player booklets
8 x Dry-erase markers
6 x Theme leaflets
16 x Banana tokens
8 x Letter dice
1 x Dice bagGameplay
This game lends itself to larger parties and is suitable for 3-8 players. I think there's a fine balance for the best player count, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to test it out at different player numbers and my final review score will reflect this. However, in the meantime let's peel the banana and learn more about this primate-themed game!
This game requires quick thinking and large quantities of wit!
Setup is fairly straightforward. Each player is given a booklet and a dry-erase marker. The banana tokens are placed in the middle of the table for all to reach, and all the dice are placed in the dice bag. You then pick a theme to play (Movies, Products, Companies, College Courses, Bands, or Food Trucks) and place that theme's leaflet in the middle for all to reach.
Players then take it in turns to roll, write and pass:
- Roll a die from the dice bag and find the correspondong category on the leaflet based on the letter rolled (draw and roll another die if the category has already been taken)
- Write the category on the top page of your booklet and return the die to the bag. You are Project Manager for this category
- Pass the bag to the next player until all players have selected.
Now let the hilarity commence...
The game is then played over two rounds, featuring more rolling, writing and passing. I am not going to explain all the rules, but I will say that whilst the gameplay initially seems a little simple, and the number of rounds low, simplicity helps when you have the confusion of potentially eight players all handing boards round to each other.
After setup, each player passes their booklet to the player on their left and round ones begins, You name made-up things using the acronyms created from rolling the dice, writing down your submission and passing booklets around until your booklet comes back round to you. Then the judging phase begins.
The judging phase is what makes this game... you all go round determining the awards to be given, picking the funniest or the one that best matches the award you have picked.
Well done if your suggested name is chosen, for you win a banana...Will you be the top banana?
I personally think that the second phase of making up marketing tag lines could be left out. You generate a slogan, following similar rules to round one, and again you do a new judging phase, but this time using the flip side of the awards for taglines. Again you win a banana if your slogan is chosen. The overall winner is the gorilla with the most bananas.
Production
The artwork and game components for this are quite extraordinary, and I have come to expect this now from Roxley.This is a dangerous precedent Roxley, so you better keep up the standard with other releases... The quality is probably top in the party games category, and completely kicks ass compared to other games of that nature.
Conclusion
The game encourages more fun and laughs than most other word games - but the passing of booklets, rolling dice, and judging by categories make it all a bit clunky, especially with eight players. The magic number of players for this game is between four to six in my opinion. Good fun for an occasional game with the right crowd. I do now prefer this to Cards Against Humanity, since this requires wit instead of sheer vulgar immaturity.
Mr Chris - The Founder
*all image sourced from Roxley