CDSK stands for 'Curious Delightful Seasoned Knowledge'. These are the four very broad categories of questions in this easy-to-play trivia race game from Groupe Randolph and Hachette Boardgames. 'CDSK' may not be a great title for a board game but inside the box you'll find an interesting twist on most other quiz question games.
This is a trivia game either for 2-4 players or, better still, for 2-4 teams - so with no set upper limit for the number of players. The magnetic box lid folds out to form the playing board, offering players the choice of a long or short game. You can expect the 'long' game to run to around 45 minutes but you should be able to play using the shorter track in around 20 minutes. Bizarrely, CDSK doesn't come with any player pieces. It's no great hardship for you to take pawns or counters from another game, or to use any suitably small household items as your playing pieces but it does seem perverse that an otherwise well-produced game doesn't include at least a set of cardboard tokens. As you can see from our Board's Eye View 360, we've been using Lego minifigures.
Once you've found suitable tokens to use, you place them on your chosen long or short starting square in what looks like a typical roll & move track. There are no dice to roll, however. Instead, having been given the more specific topic of the Curious, Delightful, Seasoned or Knowledge card drawn, you decide on the anticipated difficulty of the question - from 1 to 10. Get the answer right and that's the distance you move on your turn; get it wrong and you stay put. The low number questions are super easy, barely an inconvenience, often offering joke multiple choices that would be almost impossible to get wrong; by contrast, you can expect the highest value questions to demand very specific factual knowledge. Any question you know the answer to is 'easy' so you might very well know the answer to a #8 question but not know the #6 on the card; and of course you don't know the precise question until you've chose the number. It's that risk/reward gamble that's at the heart of CSDK. If you find you favour a particular broad category of card then that might inform your choice of question because you can see from the track on the board which numbers will take you to that category for your next turn.
The game comes with more than 50 cards for each category, so there's a lot of play value in the box. There's been an attempt to localise the questions so that the edition sold in the UK has questions specifically geared for a British rather than just English-speaking audience. That said tho' there remain several US-centric sports questions that will likely stump players who don't hail from North America.
There's a bit of variation in that there are some 'challenge' spaces where the players are set a challenge rather than a trivia question. These might include a list of 10 'true or false' statements or might give a list of sports teams and ask you to name their colours. Usually you will move forward one space for each correct answer. And like all 'roll a 6 to win' children's games, getting to the end space isn't sufficient: CDSK demands the answer to a 'Hurry Up & Win' card before you can claim victory. These include more true/false statements or placing items in chronological order. Fail and you stay put until your next turn and have to have a go at another card.
Trivia games get a mixed reception from the team at Board's Eye View but CDSK has gone down perhaps surprisingly well. It can be fun to see an overconfident quizzer go for and be stumped by a #10 question and we've had some hilarious 'hare and tortoise' type games where the slow but steady relatively-easy answerers have beaten the trivia fiends who expected to leap to the finish with just a handful of erudite responses. Tho' CDSK isn't going to supplant Wits & Wagers (North Star) as our 'go to' trivia party game we expect it to get plenty of outings as a party game filler.
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