Tap A Bell'O Game Review
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TAP A BELL’O REVIEW
From time to time, publishers send unsolicited games to reviewers. Since I have already reviewed quite a few games from the Blue Orange Games catalog, one of their new products occasionally shows up on my doorstep—a game I don’t even remember requesting. I usually review the games I have specifically requested first, before moving on to the extras, so that I can stick to the order in which the games arrive at our house.
A few months ago, a game called Tap A Bell’O showed up on my doorstep. I opened the box and spent a few minutes looking at its contents, trying to remember whether I had requested this game. (After checking my notes, I confirmed that I hadn’t.) One of my kids came downstairs, spotted the game—essentially, a box containing a bright fire-engine-red bell sitting on top of a small circular deck of cards—and asked what it was.
“Blue Orange sent us a new game,” I replied. “We’ll get to it as soon as we work our way through the huge pile of review games in the basement.” And that was that… for four whole months.
Fast-forward to the present. We were tidying up an area near the kitchen when we discovered that one of the kids had moved Tap A Bell’O into their toy stash in a basket. I hadn’t even realized the game had gone missing. “Oh, sorry, Daddy,” said my eleven-year-old. “I played with the bell a few times, then put the game there.”
“Can we play it?” asked my eight-year-old. “I want to hit the bell.”
So we did. Tap A Bell’O keeps things very simple. It’s a reflex-based slapping game, similar to games like Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza and Paco’s Party. Those two have been our family’s favorite games of this type over the past few years.
In Tap A Bell’O, players place cards on the table. When two numbers, colors, or symbols match on the face-up cards, the first player to clap their hands and then hit the bell (oh!) collects all the cards played during that round and places them at the bottom of their draw pile. As soon as one player runs out of cards, the game ends, and whoever has the most cards wins.
Yes, this rules format borrows heavily from a whole bunch of other games you and I have played before. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly interesting about it. And that’s true… until the first player nearly breaks a finger trying to slam the big red bell, or someone swings their arms so wildly that they accidentally knock the bell right off the table.
RING THAT BELL
Remember those rules I described earlier? That’s the entire game, although the rulebook for Tap A Bell’O leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, during our first game, my family (even my wife joined us for a four-player game) played incorrectly because we misunderstood exactly what the game was asking us to do. Since games last only 5–7 minutes, this wasn’t a major problem, so we set things up for a second game. During that one, we missed another minor detail: the way penalties are handled when a player touches the bell without clapping first.
So our third game was the first one we played entirely by the rules. But let’s pause for a moment. If the game had been terrible, we would have simply stopped playing, and my wife—let’s just say that “patience” is definitely NOT her middle name—would have found something else to do. But we all agreed that there was something enjoyable about this silly kind of fun, so we kept playing.
And that third game brought some real magic: shouting, screaming, laughter, and that one moment when someone swung their arm so wildly that the bell flew off our kitchen table and landed on the floor about ten feet away. The Bell family got aggressive, folks! Watching the cards and waiting for a pair of fours to appear was an absolute blast. The amount of flinching became downright hilarious. Several players received penalties. In a game that lasts just five minutes, there’s no real runaway-leader problem, so during that third game, the eleven-year-old collected a massive pile of cards, essentially reaching the top of the leaderboard with very little time left for the rest of us to make up our losses.
To be honest, Tap A Bell’O is just an average game. From a design perspective, it doesn’t offer anything we don’t already have at home. But it was fun, and it worked perfectly well as an afternoon diversion. Playing it around a small table, where everyone can reach the bell and slam it, is definitely the way to go. And if you don’t own any other slap-style card games, Tap A Bell’O will fit the bill—or should I say, the bell?—in a very loud way.
