Customer Reviews

Beat The Experts

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Beat the Experts is a fast-paced trivia game where you go head-to-head with not only your opponents, but with a variety of hand-selected experts in this new release from University Games.

At first glance, Beat the Experts seems like a regular trivia game. But there's a twist. The trivia cards contain a series of ten questions in a particular category, and the name of an "expert" in that particular category. This "expert" can be anyone from quarterback Steve Young to Bill Nye the Science Guy. These cards also tell you how many questions the expert answered correctly. In order to advance in the game, you must get more answers right than the expert did.

On each turn, one player is designated as the Reader. This person will be either someone on your team, or-if you're not playing in teams-the opponent to your left. The Reader selects five Expert cards. The Reader then reads off the category and expert on each card. The playing team chooses which expert they'd like to go up against. The team then has one minute to answer as many of the questions on the card as possible. If the team answers more questions correctly than the expert, then the team advances on the game board. Game play continues until one team reaches the Final Question square on the board.

The first time I played this, I was convinced that I was going to perform terribly. I went up against Brian Boitano, and I thought to myself, "How on earth am I going to know more about ice skating than an Olympic Gold Medalist?" I was surprised to learn that although all the questions on a card have a similar theme, they're not related in quite the way you expect. On that particular turn, I was asked a few questions about ice skating, yes-but I was also asked questions about the movie Ice Castles, the song "Ice, Ice, Baby," and the South Park musical number "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" So I ended up doing pretty well.

Beat the Experts is definitely a different type of trivia game, but it's a lot of fun-especially with a group of people. If your friends think they know it all, split them up into teams and break this game out at your next party.

I got this game when it first came out in 2004. There's a wide range of "experts" in this game. From Bill Nye the Science Guy, to Batman's Adam West, to Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall to astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Even Cleopatra is an expert, they managed to dig her up and ask her questions somehow. There are four playing pieces but the instruction book refers to teams taking turns, not individuals. The timer is more than a minute, it's more like a minute and 20 seconds. Answering more questions than the expert advances you on the board. I forgot exactly how to have to win, but you must reach the finish line first (yeah, you figured that out, I know).

I haven't played this game recently, but I still have it in my collection. It takes about an hour. It moves at a good enough pace so it's not boring, but when another team is playing, you have to sit there and wait for your turn. It's not the best game, but believe me, I've played worse games than this.

"What would Brian Boitano Do" is not just a song from South Park's full length film but also one of the Experts you have to beat in "Beat the Expert."

Brian Boitano is joined by Betty White, Peggy Post, Isaac Newton, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and a host of other people I've never heard of who answer a list of topical questions. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to answer the 10 questions on the card and beat the expert by getting as many or more correct.

The game is for 2+ people and is best played in teams. (More on this later.) The game play is as follows:

You get an expert card and the Reader (the oldest person in the game, I guess they are assuming the older you are, the more likely it is you learned to read in school) reads off the card questions to the opposing team. The team guesses the answers within the alloted time measure by the egg timer (about a minute) and if they beat the expert, they progress down to the next expert spot on a playing board.

If they FAIL to beat the expert, then they have a choice of "Did you Know?" to answer (to the left of their current expert spot on the board) or Brain Beaters on the right. The "Did You Know" are little-known, and who-cares facts about one of the experts, so you are pretty much unlikely the first time to get these right. During the game, the Reader reads off some of these facts, so eventually, playing this game, you will learn that Betty White likes rye toast and Brian Boitano has six toes on his left foot (I'm making these up.) After you try to get off the "Did You Care (Know)" square just once, you won't make that mistake again, and you'll pick Brain Beater. You have to get three, then four, then five and five right (like Cash Cab's Red Light Challenge) to progress down the board.

At the end, the first person to get to the final square is then challenged by the other teams to get the most right on the Final Expert Card, a card reserved in a sleeve hiding the answers that is saved for the end game. Beat the guy on the final square and you win. Otherwise, he wins. So just being first to the final doesn't insure you win. Huh.

Though you can play this with two players, this is best as a party game, although "best" is a relative term, as I don't like this game very much. It's best as a team game because you can guess more correct answers, especially on the Brain Beaters and then progress at more than the glacial speed it took us to play one round.

My opinion is that the "experts" are lame, one had an answer wrong that was marked "correct" (yeah, yeah, so sorry, the game says MOOPS, not MOORS) and we found this game to be quite tedious. And it is a stretch to figure out what Isaac Newton did and did not know since he's been dead for quite some time.

What would Brian Boitano do? Not play this again, and play cribbage, instead. That's what he'd do. Me too.

The instructions for this game were difficult for the teens and adults in my family to understand. My 9yo and 11yo would not have begun to figure out the rules for play, let alone the answers to the challenging questions given.

One of the goals of the game is to answer a set of ten trivia questions at least as accurately as the expert listed on the card. For example, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart answered 5 of 10 questions correctly. He did not know that in the 1965 film "The Sound of Music", Austria is the country from which the Von Trapp family escaped. Nor did he know that Marie Antoinette's beheading in 1793 was not ordered by her husband. And yet, according to the game, Sir Isaac Newton somehow knew that California does not have a city named Newton, but Kansas, Iowa, and Massachusetts do.

You might also need to answer "Brain Beater" questions, such as naming 5 of the original 9 guests on the debut episode of Hollywood Squares or naming 5 of the 6 main characters on TV's Friends. They vary in difficulty, but you'll need to come up with 5 answers to succeed at a Brain Beater.

Your other option is a "Did You Know" question, which is a multiple choice question about one of the game's chosen experts. These experts include people such as Willard Scott, Michael Glazer, Cleopatra, and Elise Veach.

This game is hard to understand, hard to play, and hard to enjoy. Because of that, it has not earned a permanent place on our game shelf, and will be recycled.

I bought this game over 6 months ago and still haven't taken it out of the box. Many times I and several different friends have tried to read the instructions but it just didn't seem like any fun. It's still in my closet.