| The Armchair
Empire
Danny Webb
August 26, 2002
USA
Tabletop Game of the Week
Squint
As a chronic doodler, drawing games have always held
a certain appeal for me. With the mainstream success
of Pictionary (and to a lesser extent, Win, Lose or
Draw), it hasn’t been all that difficult to drum up
game sessions over the years. Still, it is obvious
that most members of my primary gaming group would rather
have a root canal than be forced to put on display their
limited artistic talent. With all of the other choices
out there, games like Pictionary simply don’t come to
the table often enough. Hopefully, Out of the Box Publishing’s
new game, Squint, will alleviate that problem somewhat.
Squint is a drawing game and, as such, shares some
of the most basic mechanics with the aforementioned
games. There is one big difference, however. Instead
of drawing objects with a pen and paper, in Squint players
use cards with a variety of geometric shapes and symbols
to "build" a drawing. The game comes with 72 shape
cards with which it is possible to form a nearly infinite
number of items. This sounds like it would be incredibly
tough and, sure enough, when my brother and I popped
open the box and did a non-competitive walkthrough of
the game, our initial impression was that the game would
be next to impossible. On top of the odd mechanic,
Squint comes complete with a short "egg" timer that
makes building images a hectic process. With just one
of us guessing at a time, we rarely were able to correctly
guess a drawing before time ran out.
Luckily, when the game made its debut before our full
group, it became obvious that our fears were unwarranted.
For that first session, close to 80% of the clues were
guessed within the time limit. Even more importantly,
the process of building and guessing wasfun. As I suspected,
the game appealed more to the members of the group who
previously disliked drawing games than to those who
were already fans of the genre.
I find one aspect of Squint’s design particularly appealing.
There is no downtime. In other party games, players
are often left watching as the other team takes their
turn. This is particularly annoying in the case of
Pictionary, where barring landing on or rolling an All
Play, it is possible for a team to win the game before
the other team gets a turn of their own. (In fairness,
I’ve never seen that happen, but my partner and I once
made it from the start to six spaces from the end on
our first turn and only had to win a handful of All
Plays to accomplish the task) In Squint, however, every
player participates in every turn, either as an "artist"
or a guesser. The game works like this: one player
draws a card and rolls a die. The die shows the player
which of three items he or she will have to draw. The
player then flips over the timer and uses any of the
72 shape cards to build the object as the other players
try to guess what the builder is trying to represent.
If someone correctly guesses the clue, then both the
builder and the guesser get tokens equal to the number
of the clue on the card.
It is a simple and elegant system, and our group really
enjoyed it. The only complaint I heard was that some
of the cards had questionable rankings. Some cards
featured "simple" items that seemed harder
to draw than the card’s "difficult" choice
and, even more often, the first and second place items
seemed about the same difficulty level. Some group
members felt this skewed the scoring a little. Still,
considering the game includes around 1000 items to draw,
taking in to consideration the subjective nature of
what constitutes a hard item versus an easy one, the
designers have done an admirable job with the sorting.
Even with this minor problem, Squint
was a hit with the group. It will go immediately in
to rotation with our group’s other favorite party games
(Apples to Apples, 25 Words or Less, and Taboo).
Back
to Squint Reviews page
|
