How to Play the Rapid Rumble Board Game

Today we have a game that claims to be “The fastest, funniest, cleverest category game”: Rapid Rumble. It’s for 2 to 5 players who are ages 6 to 99 years.

We love a good category game: Scattergories, Scattergories Categories,  Clarendon’s Merriment Mixture of Categories Game and Listography. We’ve created many Scattergories lists for different seasons and occasions in our Fun Library and Category Words games in our shop. So, when we found another category game we jumped at the chance to try it out.

In this post, we’ll cover how to play, the rules how to win, and if you should add the Rapid Rumble game to your Family Game Shelf. Let’s get it to.

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Setting Up Rapid Rumble

First, there are two types of cards. The first is the letter cards. These are shuffled and dealt out to the players evenly. The players place their stack of cards in front of them on the table and do not look at them.

Second are the category cards. There are four stacks of these cards. There are science and nature cards, animal cards, culture, and things cards. Each type is shuffled and then placed in it’s one separate pile face down.

Last in the set up is for each player to take the top three cards from their letter piles as their hand. They can now look at these three cards.

How to Play Rapid Rumble

To start a game of Rapid Rumble, the first player rolls the dice and flips over the top card of that category. Science and nature is red, animals is green, culture is blue, things is orange and if you roll a black you get to choose. If you roll a white, you pick a player to choose a category.

Once the category has been chosen, you flip over the timer, and all players try to think of something that fits the category that starts with a letter that they have in their hand. When you have one, place down the card face up and announce your math. For example, if the category is “An animal found on a farm” and you have the letter F, you could say foal. Once you have played a card, you add a new letter from your stack. You can’t repat an answer in the same round.

Players keep playing cards, saying answers and pick up new letter cards until the time runs out. At this time, the next player rolls the dice and a new category is flipped over and the game starts again.

Power Cards

There are three power cards that are mixed in with the letters cards. First, there is a skip card. When you play this card, a new card from the same category is flipped over and players will play with the new category until the time runs out.

Second is the vowel cards. These cards allow you to use any vowel to start your word.

Third is the luck letter. This is a wild card and lets you use any letter from the alphabet to start your word.

Winning Rapid Rumble

To win Rapid Rumble, you will need to be the fist player to play all of your letter cards.

What We Liked

First, we like that you get to roll a dice to choose the category. This makes it different than a lot of the other category games. There are a lot of cards so there is lots of playability. The overall quality of the game is great. Also, we liked the different way to play—everyone having different letters that change; it was a nice change.

We also liked the different letter cards like skip and lucky letter.

Last, each card has a fun fact on it. These are a nice addition to the game, especially when you have to wait for some interruption in the game.

What We Didn’t Like

The first few times we played, there was just two of us. It didn’t seem to be competitive, more like we were just playing by ourselves. When we played with four players this seemed to go away.

Second, if you got three hard letter cards in your hand, say A A N, you could get really stuck.

Next, the letter cards that had a letter range on them were both nice and difficult. It was like there were too many choices for your mind to think up an answer. It might just be me though.

Should You Add to Rapid Rumble to your Family Game Shelf?

This is a harder question than it usually is for me. As I mentioned, the first few times we played we played just two player. It wasn’t very fun and we were not going to recommend it. But as we always do, you wanted to play with four players to see if that changed the game and to see what the other’s thought. I wasn’t hopeful but it turns out I was wrong. It was a much better game with more players. In fact, we immediately wanted to play again and did. Joel was going to give it a really low rating but then did a 180 and changed his rating to a high one.

So, should you add Rapid Rumble to your Family Game Shelf? I would say yes, especially if you like category games. The different game play makes it a good addition. Also, I think school aged kids would really like this game.

Get your copy of Rapid Rumble here; Canadians here.

If you’re looking for more fun with words, check out our Word Hunter game, our Category Words games in the shop and Listoraphy for another twist on the classic. Be sure to visit the Family Game Shelf shop for tons of fun with games like Dice Sticks and Wacky Putt dice mini golf!

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