I’ve already talked about Cranium and Cranium After Dark.  Now its time to add a different cranium game to the mix.  Cranium Brain Break.  This is very similar to Cranium After Dark, I felt Cranium After Dark wasn’t marketed well to the right group of people.  Whereas Cranium Brain Break has a larger audience with a very similar idea.

The game comes with the following:

• activity cards
• letter die
• 6 sided die
• clay
• paper
• timer

The cards are two sided and have questions from the usual cranium categories, Creative Cat, Word Worm, Star Performer and Data Head.  Everything is stored in a brain shaped container, which is cool, except doesn’t fit well with my board game storage, so this one often gets overlooked.

Brain Break can be played either as teams or one large group.  To play as a team, the team randomly draws 5 Activity cards, then chooses 7 of the 10 tasks to complete.  Each team takes turns trying to finish an activity in under one minute.  If a task is completed the card is kept. First team to get 7 points with at least a two point lead wins.

To play as one group, a player draws a card, and does one of the activities.  Everyone must try to guess and if the task is completed in under a minute the activity card is kept as a point.  The goal is to get 4 in a row.  If that’s too easy, you can try to increase the amount beating your old record.

Personally I like this game better than Cranium After Dark.  If you don’t have the time to commit to a full game of cranium this isn’t a bad option if you are looking for something quick and straight forward.