Ravensburger kNOW! Review

Reviewed by David Savage

We love playing board and quiz games in our house. In fact, I have been playing them for over 30 years. They provide hours of entertainment working alone or in teams. Some can be very competitive, some can be fun and silly and some can really get your brain working. No matter what the reason you are playing them, they really are an excellent source of entertainment and a great way to spend quality family time together and a perfect source of screen-free fun.

Quiz games are great for developing social skills, enjoying family time and stimulating the brain. But while excellent for getting that brain matter working and testing your intelligence, they all have a common problem – they all have a limited number of questions, so if you play the game enough, you will know all the answers, making the game useless and unplayable. Yes, with some games you can buy expansion packs with more question cards but sooner or later you will hit the same problem. Even if you don’t get to the point of knowing all the questions and answers, the questions will become outdated over time still rendering the game no good for younger generations of your family. But there is an answer – kNOW! by Ravensburger is the first quiz board game that is powered by Google Assistant meaning it constantly evolves to include the most up-to-date questions and answers!

In the box there is:

• Game board in 4 parts
• Sorting strip
• Buzzer
• 6 Pawns
• 220 Doubled-sided quiz cards

kNOW! can be played in two ways (the question card are marked with a wireless/no wireless symbol to assist playing):

• Online – suitable for 2-6 players aged 16 and above (requires Google Assistant and internet connection)
• Offline – suitable for 3-6 players aged 10 and above

The offline version of the game requires 3 players to allow for an alternating quiz-master (on your turn you act as the quiz-master and win points if the other players fail in their task).

The online version of the game doesn’t need a quiz-master so 2 can play.

The idea of the game is to get your playing piece around the board (or to the point that you have agreed that the games ends whether that is a join on the board or a time limit – each quarter of the board takes approx. 15 minutes to play). The games consists of four categories where there are different mini games under it. The categories are:

• Knowledge – with mini game Quick on the Draw
• Creativity – with mini games Up 2 Three and Great Question
• Fun – with mini games Tripped Up, Phrase-finder, Humming It Up, Sound by Sound and kNOW It All
• Intuition – Guesswork and Top Hits

We played the game using the online rules and for the most part it works very well (except when the Google Assistant misunderstands what you say to it). As you work your way around the board, there are 4 different colour topics that you can land on relating to the categories as mentioned above. They player then picks up a card relating to that colour and asks the question. The question cards will have a mini game and some categories have more than one.

• Quick on the Draw – in the offline game it is the first person to hit the buzzer and answer correctly to advance but in the online version players write their answer. You get the answer by asking Google the question.
• Up 2 Three – players have 20 seconds to write down 3 answers to the question and they have to match the 3 answers on the card of the 3 answers that the Google Assistant will supply.
• Great Question – this involves writing down the question to an answer (from the card) and then asking Google that question in the hope that it comes up with the answer you are looking for (i.e. if the word on the card is Rome then your question to Google could be “What is the capital of Italy”).
• Tripped Up – this is a tongue-twister question and in the offline version you have to repeat the phrase on the card three times, in the online version you ask Google for a tongue-twister and then listen to what it says and have to repeat the first two sentences three times.
• Phrase-finder – here you have to find the missing part of a well-known phrase, first to buzz and complete moves on (i.e. a bird in the hand … / … is worth two in the bush).
• Humming It Up – this is just for the offline version only and the quiz-master has to hum a song from the card – first to buzz in can advance.
• Sound by Sound – this is the online version of Humming It Up and you ask Google for a Sound by Sound task. Google will supply a sound (i.e. cow noise) and first to buzz in can move along.
• kNOW It All – here you are provided with a multiple choice question and have to write down the answer before the time runs down and Google reveals the answer.
• Guesswork – This is a question where the answer is always a number or date and the nearest to the answer wins (i.e. “How far from London to Edinburgh by Car”).
• Top Hits – Google will give you a word (i.e. RUN) and the players then have to write down a new word or words with that word in it (i.e. RUN or RUN DOWN) and then Google is asks how many hits for that new word and the player with the highest number of hits moves their piece along the board.

We had great fun playing kNOW! The online version of the game is excellent as the questions can be changed to suit your own needs, it will pick your location for weather and distance questions etc. and the answers will always be up-to-date. For example, if you asked who is the current UK Prime Minister it will give you the correct answer and not the one that happened to be in power at the time of printing the card – and at the moment with Prime Ministers coming along like buses with possibly another on the way, it is a great way to ensure that all age players can play.

Each segment of the board takes approx. 15 minutes, so an hour for the whole board (this was with two players so may take longer with six). The questions are varied and the variety is excellent.

While we love the game and thought is was very good it does have some issues:

• A lot of questions are based on the American side – so when asked about ball games you may be well to use soccer instead of football.
• As mentioned above about the American side of the question, we found the same question that existed on two different cards in two different categories (offline question cards) that gave conflicting answers – On the Quick on the Draw card it asked “When did women get the vote?”, while on Guesswork it asked “In what year did women get the vote?”. While slightly worded differently it is basically the same question, yet the answers were 1918 and 1920 – this is conflicting and confusing and should have in the UK or US (depending on the answer) at the end of the question. This is a big error is whatever country the game is being played.
• The tongue-twisters (online version) are quite fast and hard to grasp (but can be quite fine, so maybe it was just us). They seem easier from the offline version as only one sentence to repeat three times.

The only thing we couldn’t understand is the two different age ranges for gameplay. For us playing it we could see no reason why a 10-year-old couldn’t play the online version (under adult supervision), especially as questions can be adapted to suit and from reading a lot of the question cards for the offline game, they are much harder and quite difficult for a lot of adults, never mind children. I would be happy for a ten year to play the online version and think it would be much more fun and inclusive for a child as the questions are better suited. The questions for the offline version I feel are out of an average 10-year-olds depth, which would see them losing interest and feeling left out.

Overall, kNOW! is an excellent game, great fun and entertaining, gets the brain matter working and is perfect for screen-free family time (while you are using Google Assistant for the online game you are not looking at a screen, just talking to it in the room). It does require some tweaks with fixing the UK/US answers, but overall is a great way to spend some quality time with your friends and family.

Rating: 4/5

RRP: £29.99

Available to buy from Amazon here.