A once monthly feature to focus on tabletop game reviews, hauls, and kickstarters.

Source: Blogging for Books – I received a copy of this game in exchange for an honest review. 
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Type: Card Game/Humor
Purchase: Amazon / Barnes & Noble
Rating: 2/5

From the daughter-father duo that created Brooklyn’s beloved live pun competition comes Punderdome, the “Punderful card game [that] will replace Cards Against Humanity at your next party” (Mashable.com).

One part game, one part conversation starter, you don’t need to be a pun master to master Punderdome: the goal is to make bad jokes and have fun along the way

Punderdome is a game with a ton of potential, but also a pretty steep ability curve. Loving Puns is one thing, being able to come up with a working pun in 90 seconds based on two random topics? Well that’s significantly harder. You must live and breath puns, and you must be willing to die by the pun (at least on the inside) in order to be any good at this game…and while I thought our group was pretty fantastic at puns, we often found ourselves just staring at our paper in anger.

Pros: The rules are rather simple and it makes it easier for those new to gaming to pick up the idea of. The potential for really amazing jokes are plentiful, and there is a pretty wide variety of topics/situations to choose from. It comes with little notepads to write your puns on! More fun when you’re not playing with the rules but just testing yourself, sans points.

Cons: It’s slow going. You only have 90 seconds to get a pun written down from two random cards, and while that is kind of a long time game wise…it’s not nearly enough time to come up with a joke that actually works. You have to have a general knowledge of a lot of things, in order to pull off a pun that makes sense or else you’ll just be staring at the cards trying to figure out how to connect some incredibly different cards. That long time period of just staring sort of kills the humor every new round, because puns are at their best when thrown down quickly.

I can’t really see us playing this one a lot. It’s easy to set up and play, but it’s more stressful than anything else. As for it replacing Cards Against Humanity? Not a chance. To me the two games hardly the compare to each other, especially since the type of humor is pretty different.