Spot It

Plays: 3Px4, 2Px8.

After two very long blog posts which took much time and energy to write, I need to write something shorter and lighter.

The Game

Spot It is a simple speed game. Every card shows 8 items, and between every pair of cards in the deck, there is exactly one item that will appear on both. In every variation of the game, players race to find the matches between two cards.

What appears in both these cards?

There are five different ways to play.

The Well. The well at the centre starts with one card. Everyone else gets the same number of cards. When the game starts, you try to look for matches between your card and the well card. Once you do so, you place your card into the well, covering the well card. This means you'll reveal the next card in your deck. It also means the other players now need to find a match between their top cards and the new card that you have just added to the well. Whoever exhausts his deck first wins.

The Tower. Everyone starts with a single card. The tower starts with the rest of the cards. Players race to find a match between their cards and the tower card. Whoever does it first claims to tower card and places it onto his deck. Repeat until the tower deck is exhausted. Whoever has the most cards wins.

Triplet. Find an item that appears on three cards, and claim those three cards. Three new cards are drawn to fill in the blanks, then repeat. When the draw deck is exhausted, whoever has the most cards wins.

The Play

I played Spot It with my wife and my kids, and it was quite fun. The game is simple, but also exciting because of the real-time element. Sometimes it's weird that even after looking for a long time, I can't find the matching items. It is as if I have a blind spot in my mind. Yet sometimes the matching items just jump out at me immediately. It's quite funny when sometimes one player simply has an amazing streak, claiming (or giving away) card after card with only a few seconds in between, while the others get very annoyed because they have barely started looking for matches when the centre card is changed yet again.

Naturally Michelle and I do much better than the children. However sometimes they do have those power streaks that leave us stunned. I sometimes let the children win. When Michelle and I are in the same game and we play the variants which are multiplayer free-for-alls, we will target each other first, giving the children better chances to win a round.

The Thoughts

Light and fast real-time game suitable for playing with children and casual gamers. Suitable as a party game too, because it's very quick to explain and to start playing.

Nice-looking metal container, but in practice, round cards are a pain to shuffle.

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Buy from Noble Knight Games. Status: in stock (at time of this post).

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