Clubhouse Games Review

For as far as computers have advanced these days, every PC still comes with those standard renditions of Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Backgammon. People love these games. So it seems so obvious to take a huge collection of such gems, wrap them up in a spiffy Nintendo DS cartridge, slap online multiplayer in there, and call it a huge hit. But somewhere in the process, Nintendo managed to screw it up.

First, the good, which is that Clubhouse Games features over 40 different activities. There are a slew of card games–everything from Texas Hold ‘Em to Memory–as well as plenty of board (Chess, Checkers) and parlor (bowling, darts) games. The variety is very refreshing and allows everyone to find at least a handful that they like. One of my favorites is a game of balance. It’s like Jenga, but you’re placing bricks on a shaky scale and trying to keep the stack from falling on your turn.

At any time, you can play these games against CPU opponents, which makes the game incredibly friendly for quick-minute intervals. If you need concrete goals, there are several missions to tackle. These include bowling three strikes in a row, getting 20 points in Dominoes, or beating Mahjong in under three minutes. It’s a lot of work, to tell you the truth.

But what ultimately makes Clubhouse Games a pain in the neck to play is its over-ambitious, erratic touch screen implementation. Games like darts, bowling, and pool are way too difficult to accurately control since there doesn’t seem to be any margin of error to help compensate for shaky hands. Less involved activities such as Dominoes or Chess try to “immerse” you by making you pick up, drag, and drop your pieces. It would have been easier to just tap where you want things to go rather than trying to drag them there. Doing so causes your hand to block a lot of the screen, and you often end up dropping a piece where you didn’t want it with just a slight shift of the stylus. Furthermore, for a game that uses the stylus so heavily, the only way to pause and exit a game is to push the Start button. Was it really that easy to overlook putting a Pause button on the touch screen itself? Plus, there’s no option to switch the settings from right-handed to left-handed. Yeesh.

Fortunately, it’s easy to forgive these nuances when you’re playing a multiplayer game. Going solo, however, is just grounds for a lot of frustration. Since so many of these games have a tint of luck to them, it’s difficult to ever win a game and feel like you actually had a part in it. In fact, the game does way too much for you. Not only does it highlight which cards you can play and where they can go, it picks new cards from the deck for you. A lot of the fun of playing these games in “real life” is the tactile feel of taking your own cards and setting your own pace of the game. Clubhouse Games is on a mission to get things over with as quickly as possible, and it’s just annoying.

However, like most games, getting a couple friends together always brightens things up. Suddenly, randomness is fair, and the quirks of this game taking over or just not working well are lessened by the robust, built-in chat/paint program. It adds a lot of hilarity. The fact that this is single-card downloadable also makes it a near must for someone in your circle to own. Given friends may not always be available, you can go online and play almost every game with up to eight strangers. But this doesn’t work as well as it sounds. There is a lot of waiting to see if anyone wants to play the same game as you. As it turns out, there are always a few nobody seems to want to touch. And thanks to the DS’s friend code system, most of the enjoyment of playing with other people is lost entirely. The chat option is only available to people who are friends. Without the ability to chat, these games feel so empty. It’s just like playing against a couple CPU players, as there is little room for people to demonstrate any individual personality.

Final Comments

Clubhouse Games seems like the DS’s godsend: a collection of simple card, board, and parlor games in one package with touch control. Unfortunately, the touch control does more harm than good and makes many of these activities a hassle. Still, if you’ve got a couple friends with like handheld consoles, Clubhouse Games is a fun local multiplayer experience. Just don’t think that same fun translates well into the online mode or solo adventure. Because it doesn’t. And that… is a real shame.