Wanna know what Julia plays?

I don't know about you, but when I hear that there is a game that Julia Roberts enjoys playing, I take more than a casual kind of interest.

Who knows when you might find yourself stuck in a lift with the clear-eyed vixen of Notting Hill, with a couple of hours to kill until rescue, and then she finds out you don't know the rules to her favourite pastime. The stuff of nightmares. Time, then, to learn Cranium, a game that has allegedly taken the US - and more importantly, Ms Roberts - by storm since its launch. JR recommended it as "the most fun game" on the Oprah Winfrey show. She and her boyfriend Benjamin Bratt couldn't stop playing it, apparently. The makers claim the game outsold Trivial Pursuit in its first few months on sale. Yesterday, Cranium (costing £29.95) was launched over here, through of all places Starbucks coffee shops as well as Virgin Megastores. Time to exercise the brain.

Naturally, it being an American game, there is a lot to take on before you start. "The game for your whole brain" it says on the box. Sure enough, where other inferior games engage only one part of the brain, this one works both sides, left (deductive, reasoning) and right (creative, intuitive), by setting a series of appropriate knowledge-based or creative tests, through which you navigate your way around the board to Cranium Central. The first puzzle for my team? "Why does everything have a trademark on it," said Phil, graphic artist. Not just the name of the game, but the name of every object, every puzzle, every type of question, with TM marks on it to ward off pirates. What if everyone did that? Imagine the row between the players of Snap! and the makers of Rice Krispies? "Don't think anyone is going to be in too much of a hurry to rip off a zelpuz [an anagram of puzzle]," said Sophie, wife and mother as we examined the decks. The ingeniously named anagram puzzles were one part of Word Worms (TM). Another is gnilleps (geddit?). Perhaps all this is explained by the fact that the two young, handsome, coinventors, Richard Tait and Whit Alexander are former Microsoft executives - who better at protecting their property with bared teeth. So hip are the duo that they have been featured on the labels of Dewar's Whisky in the States - an endorsement equivalent to, say, doing the Des O'Connor show over here.

The idea of Cranium apparently came to Tait when on holiday in the Hamptons. Invited to join in some board games, he wiped the floor with the opposition at Pictionary but took a beating at Scrabble. So he came up with the idea to provide a game at which everyone could excel. Or, in other words, a game based ever so slightly on all the other successful games you know rolled into one.

There are four boxes of tasks. In Star Performer, aka charades, act out an expression (called cameo) or act like a famous person (copycat). Secondly, there's Word Worm with blankout - fill in the gaps in the words (rather like Blankety Blank) and gnilleps (erm, spelling for those who didn't get it earlier). Creative Cat has doodles with clues (as in Pictionary), while Data Head is Trivial Pursuit by another name.

So which side of the brain won? An hour and a quarter later, graphic artist/IT software designer had cleaned up against hack/wife-of-hack partnership and fund manager/wife of fund manager (who confessed to only having half a brain between them). Which just leaves two questions: when was the last time you heard someone say: "I'm just going for a coffee and a board game." And I wonder if Ms Roberts plays poker at all?