Julian Game Trip #8: Sorry, Madagascar

Of the newer games on the shelves at the hotel in Julian, I wanted to look at Sorry: Madagascar Edition because I couldn't visualize how you would add thematic content to Sorry.  Sorry is just moving around the board, bumping each other and saying you're Sorry when you never really mean it.


Right away, the way this was skinned was obvious: use big funny cardboard characters from the movie as the pieces and add more character art to the cards.  There was also movie art on the board itself.  So that's how you skin a game of Sorry.

I had a moment where the cards struck me as odd.  It didn't feel right using cards to move in this game, but I think I was thinking of Parcheesi (an ancestor of this game) or the Pop-O-Matic die roller that's actually in Trouble (a cousin of Sorry).  Then I was floored by how much text was on the rule sheet.  It's just Sorry, not some extravagant strategy game.

The cards were almost split in half from having been used so many times.  We hit a roadblock when some of the cards said something like, "If you are Red, move 5 or move back 1."   At first, since neither of us was red, we just skipped those cards.  Then we saw that the rule sheet had sections where they explain what the cards MEANT To say.  What a design blunder that was.  What they meant was, "If you are red, move 5.  If not, go back 1."  That's all it would have taken to make the cards usable without looking it up.

The other main snag with this game is which actions can affect pieces in the Home spaces, or the active pieces on the board.  You need a 1 or 2 to move a piece from your holding pen to the START space.  You can't swap with a piece that's in holding or the final Home spaces.  But that's not hard to remember.  Oddly, the rules specifically said you can't use slides that match your color.  Really?  You can only slide on the other 3 colors, but not your own color?

After that, it was just a game of Sorry.  And we were not Sorry plenty of times.

That night, up in the hotel room, I pictured this article being called "Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry", and wanted to get photos of the three different editions of Sorry downstairs (including Madagascar) plus the Parcheesi Royal Edition which was the much older version of the game.  But in the morning, we could not get to the games because they were setting up for breakfast in the parlor.




I did check our edition of Sorry when we got home.  It did have cards for movement, not dice.  The rules went on and on about trivial stuff, and explained each card in detail.  Why?  How did we go from a simple game that can be explained in a few sentences to this modern mess (supposedly for younger players)?  It's a good indication of how rules used to be basic and let players work out the details as needed, but since the 2000s, modern rules feel they have to adjudicate every possible situation for us.

Sorry, not Sorry.

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