Kids like gross. Always have. Toy makers know this and have been delivering gross toys for decades.
Garbage Pail Kids, Burp Balls, Queasy Bake Oven…. do a search for ‘gross toys’ and you’ll find not only the toys currently vying for your kids’ attention, you may also find what appealed to you as a child.
Anyone remember making creepy crawlers? Then eating them?
Seems like Santa Claus himself brought that one to my childhood house.
With no children of our own, our home these days is generally gross-free. (Pay no attention to anything my wife might say about me and Mexican food.)
But kids occasionally show up, and the ones we see most frequently know my wife and I are gamers. Ping pong, basketball, board games… we’re usually all in for whatever challenge gets thrown at us.
And that brings us to Bean Boozled.
For those not familiar with this game, allow me to introduce you. I’ll call it a board game but if it has a board, I’ve never seen it.
It does have a spinner. And jelly beans. What could go wrong?
The rules, as explained to us by the kids, are simple: Flick the spinner and whatever color it lands on, you eat a jelly bean of corresponding color.
That’s it. You now know how to play Bean Boozled. When you eat up all the jelly beans, refill bags are available at places like Cracker Barrel. That’s how wholesome the game is.
Except…
Each color jelly bean can have one of two flavors. One of those flavors is tasty; the other, not so much.
That brown jelly bean might indeed taste like chocolate pudding. But it might taste like canned dog food. The white jelly bean? Could be coconut, could be sour milk.
I will attest that while I don’t really know what some of the gross flavors taste like (slimy socks?), they’ve done a pretty good job with replicating the taste of sour milk!
My wife and I weren’t the only adult players, but we hung in there longer than the others. One of them got a booger-flavored bean and dropped out immediately. My wife grabbed a trash can after her first bad bean. She was willing to keep going but prepared to unload any further undesirable flavors.
She didn’t last long.
I became a case study for stupidity. Not only did I hang in there until I had tasted all the flavors, good and bad, but when asked to play again the next night, I agreed.
My wife declined. So did the friend who went down on his first bean. “Tasted boogers all night,” was his excuse.
Nasty.
Which of course is why kids love it.