Your Family Rocks is a unique game that puts your family memories at the center of a 6 player board game. The game uses your own family and event photos as the 60 “family cards” in the game. There’s something special about having your photos show up on the table when playing a game. How does this all work? Let’s check it out.
How it’s Played
Up to 6 players are competing for wooden tokens that are categorized as family Members, Values, Rules or Ojects. Each of these tokens have different values at the end of the game. Family Members are worth 8 points while Objects are worth only 3 points. These point values are laid our in front of each player on a little player screen that can hide the players winnings during the game.
A game is divided up into rounds that are called Family Challenges. This is one of the strengths of Your Family Rocks. There are 8 challenges that all have a unique feel. During a game you might play 2 challenges or as many as 5 challenges. This will determine how long the game will last. For our family, 3 challenges seemed like a good fit. After all the challenges are played, players count the value of their tokens and find out who won.
Winning a challenge will award you “family time”. These are used to bid on the different wooden tokens that have point values that I shared about earlier. Everyone gets the chance to bid after a challenge has been completed. Some times it makes sense to hold back and keep your “family time” for better options later and sometimes you just need to spend everything you have when you know your behind in points.
For an adult audience, the bidding process is pretty simple and easy to grasp. It takes a little longer with the younger audience. Our kids understood the bidding concept because it’s shown up in other games, but there were times when it seemed like they were just bidding for something because they felt like they had to. I feel like this mechanic makes more sense as you play the game more.
Family Challenges
In the box there are 8 family challenges that have players using the cards in unique ways to earn “family time”. One of the challenges we really connected with was called “Next Chapter”. Players choose 3 “family cards” that represent a short story and they place them face down on the table in front of them. One at a time, an active player shows there cards without saying anything. The other players have to submit a card to complete the story. The active player than picks a favorite and second favorite card and awards the players with “family time” tokens.
Some challenges remind us of different party games that you’ve probably played before but that’s not a bad thing since there’s some variety here. If you don’t feel like playing a specific challenge, just leave that one out. The game gives you options to play with the challenges that you enjoy. This flexibility is really appreciated in a family game like this.
With the different challenges in Your Family Rocks, chances are that some will get a lot of play and others will get forgotten about. Depending on the people at the table, people will gravitate toward the ones they enjoy most.
We were really impressed with the components of the game even though it was just a prototype. The wooden tokens were nice and the cards were great considering this is before any mass production has taken place.
Since the game was a prototype, the “family cards” contained random photos instead of photos from our own family. I can already imagine how much better the game will get when the cards contain specific memories, people, vacations and milestones on them. After all, this is probably the most unique selling point of this game.
With this unique feature comes my only real concern with this game. I’m interested in seeing how smooth this process will go with people adding their own photos and having their order fulfilled. We’ve talked with the developers of this game and they seem to have a good grasp on this process. I’m excited to see this project go from the current prototype to a full game with photos from our family and friends.
I’ve got to admit that I was hesitant when hearing the concept of Your Family Rocks. I was concerned that having only 60 cards would become predictable after a couple plays. The different challenges make sure that the photos aren’t used in the same way every game. Just like any game, the time on the table has made me believe this game will be a good edition to your family game shelf.
