It’s a game that most nerds have been taking part in for their entire lives without realizing it. It usually starts with a benign but ridiculous question like “Who would win in a fight, George Clooney’s character in From Dusk Till Dawn or Han Solo?” Or whatever, there are literally an infinite number of combinations out there. What then happens is an all too in-depth debate about the ins and outs of the battle and who would clearly win.

I can vividly remember a large group of friends very recently getting into a much heated argument about who was the better comic book hero, Batman or Superman (clearly it’s Batman). Voices were raised, movies/comics/tv shows were cited as evidence and sometimes accepted, sometimes discarded. Clearly we’re the target audience for a game that takes that concept and adds scoring to it.

It was probably only a matter of time before someone took this typical debate setup and turned it into a game, and Gamewrigh has done it. In Who Would Win? you’ll debate your friends to decide which famous people/characters would win in various silly competitions.

The game really couldn’t be simpler but with a price tag of only $10 that’s totally fine. What you’ll get is a sand timer and two decks of cards. One deck is filled with different celebrity and fictional character names, everything from Albert Einstein to Buffy Summers. The other deck is different competitions you’ll have to debate about, things like fund-raising or chess. This is surely aimed at the people that play and love Apples to Apples, given the similarity to gameplay. I used to love the game myself but have played it so much that I’m just tired of it, so I personally was pretty excited for change of topic that Who Would Win? would provide.

2 people each draw a card and state the name of the person on the card, then someone else flips up a card to show the event they’ll be arguing for their person about. So it might be Al Capone Vs. Peter Pan in a pie eating contest for example. Then each person takes 20 seconds (using the sand timer) to argue about why their person would win said argument. After that if there’s some rebuttals those can happen then the crowd votes on who they think did a better job. To the winner go the spoils, or in this case the event card, and the game ends when any player acquires a certain amount of event cards.

On a side note I think our favorite match-up of the night was Abraham Lincoln Vs. Yoda in a ping-pong competition. Lincoln ended up winning and we’re pretty sure it was because he could use his stovepipe hat as a blocker. Even flipping whirling dervish “Attack of the Clones” Yoda couldn’t stand up to that argument.

The problem we had with Who Would Win?’s basic rules is that only two people go at once and your chances of winning a debate depended largely on the card you were dealt. While it’s funny to think that you’d have to debate for someone wholly unsuited for a particular ability, in action it left some people scratching their heads and without much to say, especially when put on the spot. There were also a few times when people really weren’t familiar with people on their cards which also left people with the same reaction. To that end we tried two different modifications that we think really made it a better experience.

We kept up the 2 people at once game setup but let each person draw 3 cards. Then the even card was flipped up and the players had to choose and announce the person they would be arguing for. Then the game commenced as normal. This let you bypass people that clearly would have no shot at winning (like Naomi Cambell in a chess competition) and gave people a little more control over the game. We all seemed to enjoy this more.

The other was more of an Apples to Apples variant that worked as well and put everyone in the game at all times. Each player drew 3 cards, and one person acted as judge. They flipped over the event card and each person played a card from their hand face down. When this was done the judge shuffled them then turned them all up and we sort of debated as a group the different selections. The judge picked his winner and the person that played it got the event card. Then the next person became judge, everyone gave their cards to the person next to them and drew another card so everyone had 3 cards again. Rinse and repeat.

We had fun with the base game and the rules as written, but we thought the adjustments made the game more consistently fun for everyone, had seemed to do more to bring everyone into the fold more. It’s a fantastic idea and sets up perfectly a rousing night of drinking and playing games, much more so than Apples to Apples. But a few tweaks to the rules for our group took a good game and made it really great.