OK Boomer! from Games Adults Play pits the youngsters and the old-timers against one another to see who really knows the other the best. A famous Gallup poll found in 1969 that 74% of adults believed there was a generation gap between those who had seen the Great Depression and World War II and the Baby Boomers. The poll was repeated in 2009, and things had only gotten more complicated: 79% now saw a gap between the generations. That same year saw the first known instance of the dismissive “OK Boomer” used during a debate on Reddit, which would later explode on TikTok.
To quell the bickering, the generations just need to learn a bit more about each other.
OK Boomer! consists of two decks of double-sided trivia cards, holding hundreds of facts pulled from the pop culture of the different generations. The “Old School” deck presents questions from the Baby Boomers and Gen X years, typically things people who were born before 1980 would be familiar with, such as what song typically played when television stations went off the air at night, or bands before grunge. The “New School” deck presents things from the Nineties on, the up-and-coming years of the Millennials and Gen Z with terms like “extra” and “hundo p.”
Gameplay in a standard game of OK Boomer! is simple, with different versions possible depending on who is playing. Players team up based on their age groups and compete to answer trivia from the other school’s deck, with the kids trying to see if they know who “famously bit the head off a bat” while old-timers decipher what “FB” means on Instagram. If all players are roughly the same age, each person can play independently with questions earning individual points. First team to 10 points or individual to five wins the match.
While many of the trivia questions tie to slang or pop culture in music and television, numerous others are pulled from polling data, such as comparing education levels, amounts saved, or whether restaurants, the internet, or cell phones are most important to Gen Z. Many of the answers will be surprising, hopefully inspiring discussion between the generations so that the gap can close rather than tear wide open. Players may also find a good deal of crossover, such as a Gen X player wanting to claim certain grunge bands from the Nineties or Gen Z streaming-viewers feeling Friends is all their own.
OK Boomer! is a trivia game for two to eight players aged 18 and up. Games move quickly between the teams, making it a solid party game that can be played in 15 or 20 minutes for speedy players or stretched out longer with conversation. Likely there will be ample conversation as players get off their media and instead come together to talk about their experiences. People may be surprised at just how much they have in common.