Play that Tune - Review

Play that Tune

£19.99

"Play the game that'll have everyone stepping and guessing as teams compete to name that song before time runs out. Pick a tune card, select a song and 'step it out' on the musical playmat"

Music features heavily in our family life and having spent a good deal of today helping my sister with a musical Xmas video as part of her Graco Symbio reviewing, we were in the mood for a musical game.

Inside the box was a Playmat, a pack of tune cards, scoring pad, timer and instructions. It required 2 AA batteries (Xmas battery stash is being seriously depleted!)

The game is quite simple. Players organise themselves into teams. One member of a team picks a tune card and selects one of the two tunes. Using a colour and number coded notation, the tune is played with the feet on the playmat, after reading the hint. 

The other member or members of the team have to guess the tune within the 45 seconds before the sand runs through the timer. If they fail to guess correctly, the opposing team (teams) can steal the point.

Points are counted on a scoring pad. The winners are first team to correctly guess ten tunes.

We organised ourselves into two teams of two and called ourselves "The Christmas Crackers" and "The Brussel Sprouts". As often happens with these games for all the family, the younger players are slightly disadvantaged by their lack of knowledge and life experience. Our youngest player was 13 years old and there were a few tunes she had ever heard of. 

Actually playing the tunes with your feet on the Playmat was a lot of fun and we all seemed to develop our own style. There were lots of songs that fell under the hint category "Christmas" which gave it a lovely festive feel.

The 45 second guessing time limit meant that the game had a good pace.

We enjoyed playing but  I do have some criticisms.

• In the Nursery Rhyme hint category, the same tune can be used for different nursery rhymes eg Humpty Dumpty (the way I know it) is identical to Pop! Goes the Weasel.  I felt a bit cheated when I named the one that wasn't given as an answer.
• The playmat was easy to use and loud enough to hear but after playing for a while, our Number 5 key sounded a bit like a load of cars all blowing their horns at once if you didn't press it absolutely perfectly in the middle!
• We had a quick practise and played two complete games and already we feel that we have exhausted the set of cards. Maybe it is a game that needs to be put away now for a long enough time that we will forget the tunes.

The best bit of the game was definitely trying to play the tunes with your feet on the mat - and the baby loved being able to sit on it and make music!!