Blurt! Game by Educational Insights

Mastery of vocabulary is important, but only up to a certain point. For instance, Frank Neuhauser, the winner of the first national spelling bee, won on the word “gladiolus,” which is a fairly well-known flower (it’s quite possible that you have them growing in your yard right now). He said of more recent spelling bees, “Now the words are just too big. I couldn’t even get through the first round.” But while more recent winning words like “stromuhr”* would have stumped Mr. Neuhauser, he had a tremendously successful career as an electrical engineer and a patent lawyer, and was well-loved in the spelling bee community until his death in 2011 at the age of 97.

So perhaps an average vocabulary is good enough – and you don’t need to know what a “stromuhr” is to win at Blurt, the rapid word recall board game from Educational Insights. The words in this game are mostly in common use; Blurt doesn’t test your vocabulary quite so much as it tests how fast you can think of a word, which means that a quick-thinking child can keep up with Mom and Dad.

In the Blurt board game, you roll the dice to determine what clue is read and how many points the clue is worth, and then everyone tries to blurt the word out the fastest. For instance, the clue might be “a person living in total solitude by choice”: the first person to shout “hermit!” gets the points. There’s no penalty for being wrong, so a lot of the answers can be very funny – everyone stammers, stutters, wisecracks, and shouts out the wrong words, for lots of laughs! The Blurt instructions also provide game variations to level the playing field or raise the stakes – for instance, you can make the game easier by saying the first letter of the target word.

Because Blurt has such a broad age range, it’s great for family game nights and family parties where people of all ages will be playing. Blurt is also excellent for classrooms, since it helps kids build vocabulary and allows kids to blow off some steam while learning. Educational Insights Blurt is recommended for ages 7 and up, 3 to 12 players; it includes 300 cards with 1800 clues and two playing levels.

* strom·uhr: a rheometer designed to measure the amount and speed of blood flow through an artery. Yes, we looked this up, and no, we don't know what a rheometer is, either.



WARNING: CHOKING HAZARD - Small parts. Not for children under 3 years.