Spin the Bottle Review

There are few adults who could claim to have never played Spin the Bottle in their youth at least once. A stroke of genius by whoever invented it, the game has helped awkward teens the world over find a ready excuse to furtively prod one another and suck face, no questions asked, for generations.

There are, of course, plenty of other games teens taking their first tentative steps into the theatre of sexual conflict can play to get the ball rolling. Strip poker is a good one and comes with the added bonus that at the tender age of 16 or 17 nobody really knows how to play cards, resulting in the rapid removal of clothes by all participants.

Then there's Truth or Dare, a game so simple and effective its mere mention will have drunk teens rolling around on the floor with each other like confused muppets quicker than you can say, "Three more pints of snakebite please".

MEF's Spin the Bottle ingeniously combines all three of these games into the sort of package that, if it got into the wrong hands, could push Britain's escalating teen pregnancy statistics beyond breaking point overnight. Okay, so perhaps it isn't quite that suggestive, but it is certainly of a sexy slant.

For those of you who were much too mature/obsessed with Games Workshop (delete as appropriate) to take part in such shenanigans as a youngster, the bare mechanics of Spin the Bottle couldn't be easier to understand.

First, you choose the number of players for a game (three to eight), then you choose one of three forfeits – 'take off a piece of clothes', 'knock back a drink' or 'leave the game'. Once you have numbered each player, it's time to spin the bottle, and whoever's number comes up has a choice to make: the unlucky/lucky reveller must pick between truth or dare.

The truths range from the tame, 'Have you ever faked your parent's signature?', to the slightly racier, 'Have you ever faked to have an orgasm?'. The dares, meanwhile, include gems such as the fairly innocent (though hilarious), 'Shout from an open window, "I am a bloody stupid"', to the potentially dangerous, 'Confess your love to a strange person'.

As you may have already worked out, completing a truth or a dare successfully avoids you having to perform a forfeit.

Although the forfeits are pretty unimaginative, the combination of the truths and dares on offer here, together with a willing crowd and enough inhibition dissolving elixir (booze), should result in a fun evening's worth of entertainment.

Assuming you're not blind drunk, you'll note the game is visually adequate, with the actual bottle spinning section bold and pronounced to avoid confusion amongst inebriated players about whose turn it is as they toss the phone at each other.

There are times, however, where Spin the Bottle feels as though it could have been something more. For instance, the option to enter your own dares, forfeits and truths would have been a great addition. The localisation, too, leaves more than a little to the imagination at times, with awkwardly worded sentences appearing regularly.

Owing to a generous pool of truths and dares, and the fact that some of the translation slips are side-splittingly hilarious ('Mimic the bell of an elephant whilst climaxing' comes to mind), participants should be able to come out the business end of Spin the Bottle unscathed as gamers, but with a few memories about their experience that they might sooner forget.