With Hasbro Family Game Night for the Xbox Live Arcade, EA has done the unexpected and given gamers a reason to pay for virtual copies of board games that have been around for decades. Thus far, all of the games released as part of the Family Game Night hub have been worth the price, and EA is now releasing a second wave of games intended to be fun for the whole family. One of the new selections is Sorry!, the classic game that involves getting ahead by screwing over the other players. This game was a staple in my house growing up, and led to many fistfights, tears, and thrown game pieces. Luckily, the XBLA version eliminates the chance of your little brother tossing the board across the room in a rage because one of his tokens was sent back to the start.

To serve as a refresher, Sorry! pits two to four players using different colored pawns against each other in a race to get all of their tokens around the board and into their safe zone. For the most part, this involves moving a number of spaces determined by drawing cards until reaching your final destination in traditional board game format, but there are several variables that make this one a little more zany. Sorry! is played with numbered cards, not dice, and some cards allow players to swap pawns with their opponents, or take them off the board and put them back in the start zone. In addition, there are slide zones on each side of the board that let pawns skip ahead a few spaces and eliminate any pawn within. Gameplay is a fine balance between getting yourself ahead and making sure your opponents don’t do the same.



The basic board game is translated seamlessly in Sorry! on XBLA. Like the other Hasbro games, after being downloaded, Sorry! is playable from the game’s interactive hub, and allows up to four players online or off to get in on the action. There are two game modes, regular and advanced. Regular Sorry!, as you might expect, is just Sorry!, maintaining all the rules and cards of the board game. Advanced Sorry!, on the other hand, throws in a few more wacky cards that come in handy when plotting against opponents. Either way, the game is simple, fun, and easy to learn.

As far as visual presentation, Sorry! continues the Hasbro Family Game Night tradition, with the board game being set up on the same table and Mr. Potato Head hosting. The actual game board looks pretty much like the standard non-video game version, although with a bit more polish. I wish that actually choosing a card and moving had been more seamless, but actual movements are somewhat counterintuitive: you’re required to pick a pawn, at which point the movable spaces will be displayed, and then you’ll move, and then you’ll actually physically pick your card and complete the move. You can’t actually select a card when looking at your hand, only after you have chosen a pawn, which can lengthen turns unnecessarily. It’s a minor problem that is easy to get used to, but still feels strange. Picking cards and moving pawns is basically the entire game, so it seems like this process should have been a bit smoother.



Like Connect Four, I likely wouldn’t have given Sorry! a second look if not for having to review it, but now that I have, I can’t stop playing it. The changes EA made for the XBLA version were minor, but is definitely worth the $10 price, especially considering that it’s cheaper than the actual board game. Sure, getting rid of players isn’t the same without the satisfaction of physically knocking their pawns off the board, but it’s also really nice to be able to play Sorry! online with friends any time I want. EA’s Hasbro Family Game Night has been surprisingly impressive so far, and Sorry! is no exception. Unless you hate board games for some reason, you will get your money’s worth out of the latest addition to the Hasbro party.