Bravo Bravo Game Review

“I’m surprised this flick made it to theaters.”

I find myself uttering that line from time to time, especially when I see a film featuring actors I’ve heard of. I get it—it’s called “the movie business” for a reason, and that means that sometimes studios release films because they need to make a quick buck.

Bravo Bravo (2023, Randolph) elicited the same sort of comments during recent plays with my two kids (a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son). It feels like a game that exists only to further the business of making money, because it is a terrible product.

A somewhat shocking moment occurred when my daughter made the following comment after our first play of Bravo Bravo:

“This isn’t really a game, right?”

Bravo Bravo is a bit like the vastly superior Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, published by Dolphin Hat Games. In both games, a card is revealed, and players have to say a certain word (or, like Dolphin Hat’s also-superior 800 Pound Gorilla, perform a certain gesture). If they say the wrong word or dance the wrong dance, there’s a penalty.

In Bravo Bravo, here’s the ruleset: when a card is revealed, a player has to say the name of the character on the card—slime, ghost, cactus, etc. Some of these character cards feature the character doing a gesture, like pricking their finger (“Owww!”) or clapping their hands. In those cases, the active player just has to do the same gesture.

There’s only one card for the first turn. On all future turns, there’s a second card in play, sitting beside the first revealed card. Then, players just have to say or do the thing on both the first card and the second card. If they make a mistake, they take a card from the general, out-of-play-for-this-playthrough supply (because only about half of the included cards are used in a game of Bravo Bravo) as a “fault” penalty point.

Bravo Bravo can be played competitively or in teams…with the team variant being a challenge to see how many turns can be taken before making a mistake.

Friends, I’ll give it to you straight—I was appalled when I played our first game of Bravo Bravo. It just isn’t interesting, and worse, it’s way too easy for both kids and adults. Across four games (games only take about five minutes) in both co-op and competitive modes, players only took one fault card. ONE!!! After the second game, I re-read the admittedly short rulesheet to make sure we had it down correctly.

Sadly, we did.

Bravo Bravo, from the normally reliable publisher Randolph, is not good. But there is one saving grace. In each game, players select three card sets that are bundled with the set of banana characters to make a complete set for a game. You have things like ghosts and slime, but one of the sets features a kid without a name. The rules ask you to make up a name for that character, so we just named the character Steve.

This didn’t make the game any better. But the kids thought that was funny.