How I long for another board game night with friends in these uncertain times. We’ve dabbled with Zoom and other inventive ways but in the end, nothing beats being together in one room. What the dub?! looked to be a potential side dish until we’re allowed to host our game nights for real.
Movies against humanity
Anyone who ever played cards against humanity will be familiar with the idea behind “What the dub?!”. I played my fair share of these types of games over the last few years since they started popping up everywhere with a multitude of themes. With all these types of games, players are presented with an uncompleted scene or a situation where you’ll need to fill in the blanks. Some of these games use cards with words to fill in the blanks while others ask to simply use your imagination. After everyone reveals their version, each player gets to cast a vote on who offered the best or funniest solution. Points are then awarded to whoever got the most votes and another round starts.
What the Dub?! uses the same principle with digital enhancements. First up, players need to use a phone, tablet, or computer to play the game. At the start of the game, a “room” is generated with a room code. By surfing to playWTD.com and entering the room code, you can join the game. The game uses old B-movies, public service announcements, and old instructional videos as the setup. Each clip has some missing dialogue. After the clip is shown, players need to overdub the missing dialogue by using the site. When every player entered their dialogue, the “dubs” are then played back embedded in the clips using text-to-speech. Players cast their votes on the funniest overdub and points are rewarded based on the most votes before another round starts.
Party play
What the dub?! is a casual game to play where it’s all about being the wittiest. The game requires no lengthy introduction to be played and can be played by anyone. A standard game consists of 5 rounds which – depending on the number of players – takes about 15/20 minutes to complete. With over 300 clips, What the dub?! has a lot of replay value. Even when you encounter the same clips twice, there is always a new “dub” to outwit your fellow players. I would suggest using the console version over the PC version because everyone has to be able to see the screen. With up to 12 potential players, cramming these around your PC might not be very handy.
House rules
Wide Right Interactive made it possible to adjust some aspect of the game to cater to your needs. The game is most fun if played in the same room but it can also be played over streaming services (twitch, youtube streaming, or just pointing a webcam at the screen). When streaming there’s always a bit of delay. After each scene, you only get 45 seconds to enter your dub which can be quite short, especially with potential delay from streaming. Adjusting the timer is entirely possible from the setting menu. In this menu, you can also adjust the number of rounds up to 10. There is also a rude word filter in case you want to make it more family-friendly.
English only
The game only features clips in English which makes this an English-only game by default. If you and your friends aren’t fluent enough in English, you won’t enjoy this game. Since your overdubs are replayed with text-to-speech it can result in some unintended funny moments when spelling mistakes were made. We actually tried making the text-to-speech “sing” by deliberately entering gibberish. Entering sentences in other languages also ended up sounding more hilarious than the actual overdub.
conclusion
What the dub?! is a nice concept to use video clips in a “fill-the-blanks-and-vote” board game. I do wonder how many times I would use this setup in favor of just playing my board games at an ordinary table. The novelty factor will surely attract some folk and maybe in combination with the Jackbox party games can make for an entire digitalized board game night. I however doubt this will become a regular thing for my board game night.
