Channel Surfing A Social Event With New Milton Bradley Game
Rejected by loved ones because you hog the remote? Condemned by jealous comrades for your dazzling capability with the clicker?
If so, you are the frustrated remote control connoisseur with no outlet to express your God-given talent. Until now.
Milton Bradley has come up with the appropriately titled Channel Surfing, an easy-to-learn game that simply requires owning a remote control and a TV with cable. A comfortable couch probably wouldn’t hurt, either.
It would be easy to criticize the game as further proof of the dumbing-down of America. And you’d probably be right.
After all, the gist of the game is to have one team member scan channels with the remote control while teammates attempt to match objects on TV with items printed on a set of 12 cards. A point is awarded for each item you can match to the cards in under two minutes.
But it’s not as easy as it seems.
The items printed on the cards range from “weird hat” to “facelift” to “baggy pants,” which means many of these words have multiple meanings and are subject to interpretation. And that’s where the fun begins.
The challenge of the game lies in ambiguous words such as “has-been.” One surfer came upon actor Alan Alda and her team believed Alda qualified.
A member of the verifying team (the team not controlling the remote control at the time) vehemently disagreed: “He was in a recent Woody Allen movie,” he argued.
What followed was what the directions refer to as a “friendly feud” in which the surfing team is allowed to argue its point with the verifying team, but while the clock is ticking.
Mark Morris, a public relations manager with Milton Bradley and a self-confessed “media junkie,” came up with the concept of Channel Surfing and brought it to the game developers who made it a reality. “I did the fun part and everyone else did the work,” he said. Spoken like a true couch potato.
Morris is the first to admit that Channel Surfing ($15) is “not a brainy game,” but it certainly is a “social, non-intense” one.
A recent Channel Surfing competition actually stirred a political debate.
A player trying to find a match for the word “slimy” surfed to C-SPAN where Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was on the Senate floor. He failed to persuade the verifying team.
Anyone with a knowledge of the vast TV landscape will have an advantage when playing. One of the items on the card was “bad hair day.” The savvy surfer went immediately to the NBC affiliate and, sure enough, there was “Seinfeld’s” Kramer and that infamous head of hair. No debate there.
Channel Surfing is certainly not for all.
“I felt empty inside,” said one exhausted player. “I watched three hours of television and I have nothing to show for it.”
Sounds like just another night in front of the tube.