Overview

When I was ten years old, my best friend and I worked out a way to play the board game Sorry! over the telephone. We each had our own copy of the game and had numbered the squares around the board to help keep track of each other’s pieces, trusting that the other person wouldn’t cheat. It was a great way to spend a rainy afternoon at home in the era before personal computers were common. Hasbro Interactive has finally come out with a computer version that does pretty much the same thing, only with neat graphics, cool sound effects, up to four players and without the possibility of cheating.

Gameplay, Controls, Interface

In the updated version for the PC, Hasbro has added personality to the pawns, complete with voices and animations. They have included several different ways to play the game, all of which include the option to play over the Internet. The traditional rules are taken straight from the board game (and I am going to make the assumption that nearly everyone has played this game at one point or another) and can be played against either the computer or human opponents in either teams or individually. Way Sorry! is a new way to play the game with additional cards, and is a good deal more cutthroat. There are five new cards included with these rules: Buddy allows you to move a pawn to a square next to the nearest pawn in either direction, Bully switches places with the nearest opponent in either direction and bumps it back to Start, Punish prevents any pawn from moving for one turn, Happy protects one pawn from attacks for a turn, and Way Sorry! is essentially the same as the Sorry! card, only the player moves all his or her pawns from Start instead of just one, switching them with the opponents’ pawns on the playing board and knocking them back to Start.

Both rules also allow for Strategy play, dealing the players five cards at a time. The cards can then be played in whatever order the player chooses (for example, one of my favorite things to do was to play a 2 card which would break a pawn out of Start followed by a Back 4 card which would set me just a few spaces from Home).

Graphics

The graphics and animation in Sorry! are quite fun, at least in the beginning. The pawns have a variety of ways to move around the board; scooting, rolling, bouncing and drilling their way Home. The game allows you to see these moves either in close-up animation shots or from the standard board view. After two games I shut off the option for the close-up shots; they took more time and really dragged down the speed of gameplay.

Audio

The pawns quip at each other as gameplay ensues, taunting the other pieces and grumbling when things aren’t going their way. This was also an option I turned off after several games, as I found the voiceovers becoming repetitious and they began to wear on my nerves. Until that point, though, I did enjoy them and even found some of the barbs lobbed at the other pawns to be quite funny. Fortunately, the dialogue can be shut off. The other sounds are nothing fancy, just the shuffling of cards and some simple sound effects to accompany the pawn animations.

System Requirements

Minimum: P100 or higher, Win95, 16 MB RAM, 50 MB hard drive space, 4X CD-ROM drive, 1 MB SVGA video card, SoundBlaster compatible sound card
Recommended: P150 or higher, 2 MB SVGA card, 28.8 baud modem

Documentation

The documentation is exceptionally thorough, listing all the various rules and cards and explaining the basic moves of the game. Even if you’ve never played the board game Sorry!, you should have no trouble figuring out the gameplay from the instructions included.

Bottom Line

I really enjoyed this game and spent many happy hours playing against the computer, my husband, and complete strangers out on the Internet. It’s a wonderful extension of the classic game.

Review Posted On 4 August 1998.

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