who wants to be a millionaire game review

When Ginger fox asked us if we wanted to review their fantastic game who wants to be a millionaire we jumped at the chance! We love playing lots of board games over Christmas especially and we’d never played it before so it was perfect for our kid’s ages. We love a variety of different games and often look out for reviews on them on the lead up to Christmas. We love quizzes, action games and traditional board games, we will always try them to see if we take to them. I remember the excitement when the TV show was first out and it’s great that there is now a board game of the popular show.

The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire board game takes a slightly different format to the TV show. Instead of each player answering their own questions, all players answer the same question. Get the answer correct, you move up the money ladder. If you get it wrong, you tumble back down to your last safety net. The winner is the first player to answer the millionaire question correctly.

The key difference is that the question asked of all players is always that of the highest placed player at the time. So, if you’ve got one player on £500,000 and the others have fallen back to £20,000, everyone has to answer the £500,000 question – which is obviously much harder than the £20,000 question. It’s a bit unfair on the weaker players, but better than the alternative of giving players higher up the board an easy question.

There is nothing stopping you from playing the quiz the conventional way and seeing how far each individual player can get up the money ladder, but it would mean a lot of waiting around doing nothing whilst you wait your turn to play. Overall, I think they’ve got the format of the board game right and certainly for my children’s ages it seem a good format for them to play it and engage effectively (they are 9,11 and 14).

The key innovation for this 2021 version of the game is the digital lifelines which really brings it into the current year! Each player has four lifelines, which are identical to those in the show, namely:

• 50:50
• Phone a friend
• Ask the audience
• Ask the host

Each question card has its own QR code on it. When a player wants to play a lifeline, the idea is that they scan the QR code on the question card to get the lifeline options. This was great as it brought a new dimension to game play!

All in all we as a family enjoyed playing it and any general knowledge style game is perfect when there are different ages of player. It was rated good by all game players from age 9-65 so would be a great addition to your collection.

We were sent the game to review and have tried to be honest with our opinions.