Dilbert: The Board Game Review

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Dilbert: The Board GameFull-color boxed set with game board, six-sided die, six employee stand-ups, six employee cards, Pointy-Haired Boss stand-up, plastic stands, 15 glass signature tokens, 70 memo cards, 26 project cards, 18 consultant cards, 18 trait tokens, 17 work tokens, six happiness tokens, six cubicle tokens, two donut tokens, one out of order token, one Todd token, one Ted token, one family portrait token, one plastic plant token, rulebook; $29.95
Scott Adams, creator of the mega-popular Dilbert comic strip, has been accused of having spies in everyone's office. How else could his observations be so piercing? Well, the folks at Hyperion must have agents in everyone's game group, because they've developed a fine adaptation that brings the strip to the tabletop while maintaining its cursed humor. Everyone must now report to work at Dilbert: The Board Game.
The object of the game -- designed for two to six players with an hour playing time -- is to have the highest Happiness level when the boss finally gets traded to upper management.
Players take an employee playing piece and the card and work tokens that accompany it. Three to six drudges can take part. Everyone gets lined up in cubicles; the closer one is to the boss, the unhappier one becomes, knowing at any moment the call could come to perform the most pointless task first (cube position breaks many ties). Every character is rated for Motivation (how far he can move), Apathy, Incompetence, and Offensiveness. What no one has a lot of is Happiness, and they'll spend the game trying to get it.
Each turn, characters find themselves assigned to horrible, thankless projects, and they wander the halls and offices of the board in hope of finding all the signatures they need for the job. They may be helped by Memo cards; these offer ways of skirting danger or foisting things off on someone else. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome may place the burden of making die rolls on another player; Casual Day could work against any player wearing blue jeans; and Sexual Harassment hurts those who touch someone else's tokens. If someone gets a signature from all the departments involved in a task, the project is killed (no one wants to take responsibility for that particular turkey).
Those signatures may not be easily secured if the employee runs afoul of one of many pitfalls. Meeting the boss knocks a character over and darns him to Heck. Some tasks are assigned to, say, "the most Offensive employee," and if someone chooses to switch their level of that stat with someone else they may dodge that bullet. Worse still, a set of Dogbert's consultant cards sit in the middle of the board, and anyone who stumbles into the meeting there may trigger one. These make life even more miserable for everyone (except Dilbert, who can ignore them; and anyone currently enjoying the anonymity of the restroom). For example, budget cutbacks drain Happiness every time the sufferer touches the die. Other cards may require everyone to guess the next die result or to compliment the active player, and Proprietary Non-Disclosure Policy makes the game worth buying all on its own.
But once the signatures are in hand, they can be placed on a matching project. Enough of them kill an assignment. That's good for anyone working on it, because every turn players lose Happiness for their tasks. The person who ends an assignment gains Happiness. When a character and the Pointy-Haired Boss cross each other on the Happiness track, the poor taskmaster gets traded to upper management. The player with the highest final score, as adjusted by things like how good their current cubicle assignment is, claims what little victory his dead-end position allows him.
The best part about the pieces is how big and bright they are. There's not a lot of time wasted on overly fancy graphics. The game shares the cartoon strip's Spartan sense of style and décor, favoring the simple over the detailed. Cartoon blurbs are scattered throughout the game's equipment and the rulebook is clear and concise. Everyone's skills (Apathy and so on) are tracked on the board using markers, and these are unfortunately quite small. Also, the board seems to warp without too much effort.
A lot of games like this turn out to be gimmicky cash-in opportunities, and while that would be quite Dilbertesque, this game makes players laugh just reading the rules. It becomes funnier still when all the separate ways to hose players come together to make life miserable for all concerned. Touches like drawing a real and practical distinction between the employees and the players playing them (some cards target one over the other) set off round after round of the giggles, and some of the potential card combinations can be positively gut-busting.
Dilbert: The Board Game is funny, unpredictable, and playable. The humor and the game both have staying power and make good use of their subject matter. More than a straightforward Dogbert marketing ploy, Hyperion makes their license count.
--Andy Vetromile


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The Dilbert Principle: The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management. Welcome to the absurdities of the business world: a place of rightsizing vision statements bungee bosses peer reviews total quality management and team-building exercises; a place where millennia of evolution is put to use in the struggle for the best cubicle and competition over office furniture. In Dilbert the Board Game you and up to five friends toil in an office of evil HR directors accounting trolls canine consultants and a boss who bears a suspicious resemblance to the devil. Every project assigned to you is doomed from the start so your best bet is to dump it on someone else or try to get it killed before it eats away any more of your life. In fact the only thing that really matters in the end is your own happiness. So why bother with work?

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