Beat That game review: A new family game from Gutter Games !

Disclaimer: We were given this copy of Beat That game to review free of charge, but words and pictures are mine. This post contains affiliate links, see more information here.

As much as I like Gutterhead, it really isn’t a family game (unless you have a really weird family) – but Gutter Games’ newest offering, Beat That! is much more family friendly.

Aimed at children aged 11+ but lots of fun for smaller children too, the game poses 160 silly and wacky challenges – some easy, some a little trickier – and the aim is to bet on whether you can do them or not!

What’s in the box?

In the box you get:

80 betting tokens in blue, orange and yellow (blue are worth 1 point, orange are worth 3 and yellow 5)
4 dice
10 cups
5 balls
Some chopsticks
A tape measure
Sand timer
Memo pad
16 challenge cards
Instructions

How to play Beat That!

The instructions are really simple – and can be made even more so for smaller children.

Officially, you start with ten tokens – 5 blue, 3 orange and 2 yellow. Decide who goes first by rolling the dice and whoever gets the highest number picks the first challenge card.

There are four types of challenges – Solo, Battle Royale, Buddy Up and Duel.

Solo challenges are attempted by single players, Battle Royale challenges are played by all players against each other. Buddy up means you work in pairs and duels are challenges where the player goes head to head with another.

Obviously if there are only two players, you can’t Buddy Up, so you can remove these from the pile or skip over them when they’re selected.

Players bet on their own ability to do the challenges laying down a token worth 1, 2 or 5 points. When the bets are down, each player takes it in turn to do the challenge starting with whoever picked the card. If they can do it, they win their token back but if they don’t, it goes to the bank.

There are ten challenges in total – whoever has managed to bank the most tokens at the end is the winner.

Playing Beat That! with younger children

With two small children, both under the advised age for the game (4 and almost 6), we changed up the rules a little and had teams of one adult and one child, rather than working individually.

Instead of starting off with tokens and betting, we each got a token when a challenge was successfully completed by either the kids or us (or both in a buddy up challenge!).

I was surprised at how many of the challenges they were able to do; stacking cups, knocking balls off and picking things up with chopsticks were all easy enough.

Other challenges needed a bit more input from the adults – like holding a cup in your mouth and throwing a ball into it – and others I couldn’t even do, like bouncing two balls at the same time and getting them both into a cup!

I don’t want to share too many of the challenges; but there are 160 in total (16 whole games’ worth). If you want to know what they are you’ll have to buy Beat That! to try it yourself.

The kids really enjoyed playing our version of Beat That!

It might get frustrating for a younger child so adult teammates is definitely the way to go if you’re playing with children younger than the recommended age of 11.

That said, I was surprised how many challenges they could do without our help.

Beat That! is a great family game for a rainy weekend.

It is simple to learn and takes no time at all to set up, but you do need a fairly large, flat space like a dining table to play.

If you want to play a shorter or longer game you can of course change the number of tokens/challenges, but ten was just about right to hold the concentration.

The cups and balls are sturdy and should last many games. It all packs away neatly inside the box for storage.

How much and where to buy Beat That!

Beat That! has an RRP of £24.99 and you can buy it from Amazon using the link below or direct from Gutter Games.