Battle of the Sexes board game review

A few weekends ago we went to board game night at a friends house. Four couples total played games until 4 in the morning. The hosts decided to play adult themed games and it was a blast and can’t wait for the next one. However as sometimes happens there was a problem in the night.

Our problem was with the first game we played: Battle of the Sexes.

It looked like fun in a men vs women prove who is superior kind of way. Basically players must answer trivia questions about opposite gender topics. The concept is very dated and wrapped up in lame old timey sexism. Many of the questions couldn’t be answered by either gender. Unless players are as OBSESSED as the writers are with the 50's ideal of gender roles you won’t be able to answer many questions. You know where guys are always fishing and watching baseball and the women are in the kitchen and shopping.

The game is presented in such a way that men should feel ashamedly “girly” for knowing the answers to the questions they answer and women should feel the helplessly ditsy female with their questions. The "hahaha the other gender don't know stuff" element of the game gets old fast and descends into a game with no movement. Battle of the Sexes is just bogged down by an outdated way of looking at gender roles. The concept behind the gender role separation was insulting to our group. The women consisted of my car girl wife, a motorcycle riding lawyer, a woodworking business owner, and the hostess who loves fishing (the game was rigged in her favour!) And the number of cooking questions for the guys was insulting in a world where men are iron chefs. Yes I know what a béchamel sauce is… I had to give 3 out of 5 of the mother sauces and the only other I could answer was hollandaise.

The trivia element suffers in that the game rules force you to work at making your opponents feel dumb. The player who reads the trivia cards lead with whichever of the three questions they want and the responding player must answer them to move. The obvious strategy for the reader is to lead with questions your opponents don’t know to throw them off their game and shake confidence. I don’t know about you but I can be kind of an ass so I really don’t need a poorly designed couples party game to help start fights and make my wife resent me.

Finally the game suffers from a fatal flaw of trivia games: Not enough variation in theme for all players to participate. If a player doesn’t have the specific world experience in the absurdly limited scope of trivia in the game they will not be able to participate. It hits a downward spiral of making the player feel dumb to the point of completely sucking out the fun for the night and even people with my limited capacity for empathy can feel the blahness. This is the kind of game that pushes players away from the hobby.

To sum up the players at the table disliked Battle of the Sexes. It suffered from a poor design of the trivia element that seemed geared to make players feel stupid. The game also suffered from a weirdly outdated sexist model of gender separation that really didn’t fit with the equal partner relationships of the players involved. We gave up playing this without finishing, boxed it up and started playing the other games. Thankfully the remainder of the night picked up to face hurting laughter. I do not recommend this game at all. It is tedious, bland, and it is just fodder for relationship strain.