Extreme Babysitting: Evil Baby Orphanage
Rating: 6 out of 10
Type: Card
Suggest Ages: 13+
# of Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 15min+
Replay-ability: 5 out of 10
Expansions available: Yes
Cost: Approximately $15
I should start by saying that this game isn't for everyone. In order to truly like the game, you have to be willing to embrace the bizarre dark humor. The premise of the game is that each player is a Time Nanny who uses their ability to travel back in time to adopt evil babies. For example, the Baby Deck is made up of evil babies ranging from baby Hitler to baby Guy Fawkes. They adopt these evil babies before they grow up and become horrible people in the hopes that they can turn them into less horrible people. (Nature vs. Nurture, maybe?)
There are two decks for this game. One deck is the Baby Deck which is made up of all the evil babies. Each baby has a different set of actions that it takes if it is unsupervised during a player's turn. The most common of these actions are Bite, Bully, Grab, Creep, and/or Babble. Although some cards have no unsupervised actions and some have special unsupervised actions such as the Unabomber who allows you to use your good toys are bad toys. (We'll get to toys a little later.)
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| The unsupervised actions are show by the different symbols within the circles or with text explaining special actions. Due to blurry photo the babies from left to right: Robespierre, Joseph Stalin, Lizzie Borden, and Elizabeth Bathory. |
The second deck is the Nanny Deck which contains special nanny cards. One card, the "Trail of Cookies" allows players to lure a baby away from another player. Another, the "Musical Chairs" lets a player choose either another player or themselves and whoever they choose has to place all of their babies under the baby draw pile and select new babies from the top of the draw pile. This card can be dangerous to play because the player could draw higher mischief point babies and be closer to winning the game. (I'm getting to the winning, I promise!)
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| Special Nanny Cards and also two "bad toys": Sippycup of the Damned. |
But first, the toys! Good toys such as the "puppy-sized elephant" allow a nanny to supervise their babies, nullifying their unsupervised action. For example, Lizzie Borden is a biter baby but when you give her the puppy-sized elephant, she does not bite during that turn. Supervising is an important step because it allows you to keep your babies or prevent your babies from helping other orphanages.
So how do you win? A nanny wins when she/he has ten mischief points at the beginning of their turn. Each baby card has a set number of mischief points, signified by the number in the top right corner of the card. It can be tricky to win because the other players have all of their turns to knock down your score and steal your babies.
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| This a typical hand of cards. This player has 6 mischief points, three good toys, and two special nanny toy cards that let me steal a certain type of baby from their opponents. |
Overall, this game is very fun and quirky. The art is fitting and adorable. I wouldn't recommend this game for younger players because of the violence displayed with guns, but for a mature group of people with the right humor, it's a great game. The game is often short (though it can stretch for a while if all the players remain on their toes) and so this game is a nice break from more complex, intensive strategy games. It also has a nice variety of cards so that the replay-ability is better than some other games. I have played multiple rounds of this game in one night without getting bored or annoyed because you receive different babies and nanny cards and so the game is altered.
If you have any questions, feel free to post in the comments below!
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