Info
Wits and Wagers is the fun trivia party game where you don’t need the right answers to win! For each question, bet on the answer you think is closest to the truth, whether or not that answer is your own. Use your knowledge of trivia, your intuition, and the odds to help decide where to bet! Seven rounds of questions—plus dancing characters and upbeat music—keep a fifteen-minute game lively for family and friends, local or online.
Number of Players: 1-6
Released: 2008
[Show as slideshow]
Review
Wits and Wagers is a quiz game with a bit of a twist.
Based on the popular 2005 board game, the winner is the person with the most tokens. As the title suggests, along with having to answer questions correctly to gain these chits, players are also able to bet them on whoever they think has given a correct answer. As you’d expect, guessing correctly rewards the player with even more tokens, while getting it wrong means they loose them.
In a typical quiz with multiple choice questions this betting wouldn’t play well with the risk/reward factor because the player could be sure of the answer for the majority of the time and just bet on themselves. In order to ensure it works, Wits and Wagers’ questions are specifically intended to be extremely difficult. There is some general knowledge but most are based on obscure stuff like census data that a normal individual is highly unlikely to know (unless they’re actually some sort of supercomputer is disguise). Answers also have a huge numerical range and there are literally hundreds of possible choices to each, so it’s not just a case of taking something like a one in four chance and guessing correctly.
This means players has to be a little bit smarter than just betting on themselves and hoping they get it right, particularly as the winner will be the person closest to the right answer. With reportedly 700 questions, the chances are that it’ll also be some time before you see the same ones coming around again
Visually the screen layout can feel a little busy until you get used to it but there’s a nice, quirky sense of humour to the game. Being able to make your on-screen marionette style character jerk about in celebration or disappointment, or just being able to create an anthropomorphic nightmare with a canine head, is amusing at first but once you’ve seen them in action a couple of times the novelty wears off rather quickly.
Alongside the single player where the A.I. controls the opponents, the game also supports local play for up to four players and up to six players over Xbox Live, making use of the Live Vision camera if it’s available. Those who purchased the retail release of Scene It for the Xbox 360 will be pleased to know the game also supports the Big Button Controllers. Unfortunately the layout of the game doesn’t lend itself to using these as well as it could and most will find it easier to just to a joypad instead.
Like the majority of quiz games Wits and Wagers is the most fun when playing with others. The single player has limited appeal and so it’s only worth considering purchasing if the intention is to use it as a multiplayer title or party game.