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- Gamewire Game Reviews
Patrick Korner
May 2004
USA
Those who know me personally know that I am actually
an Engineer by profession. Sadly, this means I don’t
get to enjoy the jet-setting lifestyle that others in
the gaming community can – no weekend jaunts to
major gaming conventions for me! But what it also means
is that I spend much of my time preparing technical
drawings. Ask me to draw a cube, and I’ll give
you a beauty – complete with full dimensions,
material type, you name it. Now, ask me to draw a trumpet.
Or a flower. Or (gasp!) a face. Funny, you say, they
all look alike? Yup, I’m a lousy artist. Take
away my ruler and you’re left with a whimpering
wreck who can’t draw to save his life. Oddly enough,
I’m also not a big fan of Pictionary – I
think there may be a connection there somewhere…
Enter Squint, a party game released by Out of the
Box. People like me, folks who couldn’t draw a
hard-boiled egg if they tried, can rejoice: this is
a sketching game without the sketching.
There are quite a few bits in this game: an egg timer
(complete with green sand and blue stands to match the
game’s colour scheme), a die, a card tray, 80
green plastic scoring chips, 168 double-sided Squint
Cards with sets of nouns on them, and a set of 72 Shape
Cards (pieces of square cardboard), each of which has
a shape (or part of a shape) pre-printed on it. Apart
from wishing that the shape cards were made of somewhat
stronger stock, the components are generally well-executed.
The object of the game is (surprise, surprise) to
get the most points. You win points by being a good
guesser or by being a good picture-builder. On your
turn, you first roll the die (which has numbers between
1 and 3 on it). The number you roll determines how difficult
the word you’re going to have to try and get people
to guess will be – 1 words are pretty easy, 3
words can be very tough. Then, draw a Squint Card and
(silently) read which word you got. Once you replace
the card in the tray, the timer starts and you’ve
got about a minute to create a shape with the Shape
Cards that will let your fellow players guess your word.
If the timer runs out, too bad.If someone guesses your
word, though, both you and the guesser get scoring chips
equal to the difficulty of the word. In other words,
if you get someone to guess a “2” word,
then you and him both get two chips.
The real fun of the game is in scrambling to try and
find the right Shape Cards to build your picture. You’re
not allowed to say anything other than “yes”
or “no”, so you’ve got to let your
picture do the talking! Animating your construction
is permitted, as long as none of the Shape Cards leave
the table. You can also use upside-down cards to block
out portions of other cards. According to the rules,
squinting does actually help you guess the words, but
my eyes are pretty poor, so I don’t usually give
that particular strategy a try!
After a pre-set number of rounds around the table
(determined by the number of players – the greater
the player number, the fewer the number of rounds),
the game ends. Players count of their chip total, and
the highest total wins. Ties are broken via ‘sudden
death’ rounds between the tied players.
So far, Squint has gone over very well with the folks
I’ve played it with. Being forced to use the pre-printed
Shape Cards tends to level the playing field between
the artists and the scribblers in the crowd, and the
game mechanic of rewarding both guessers and creators
is well thought out. It’s definitely a party game,
make no mistake, but it’s a party game done right
– one that doesn’t reward people who know
ridiculous amounts of trivia or bore people to tears.
There are a total of 1008 possible words to guess, so
it’ll take a while before the replay value goes
down and you start getting repeated words – always
nice.
My quibbles with the game are few. I’ve already
mentioned my wish that the Shape Cards had been made
of sturdier stock, as I can see my copy getting worn
over time. The cards go through quite a bit of wear
as people frantically search for the right shapes, and
thicker stock would have minimized the risk of bending,
etc.
My only other comment is that the degree of difficulty
between words of varying number is a bit uneven. Some
of the players I’ve played with have commented
that some of the ‘3’ words are easier than
some of the ‘2’ words,and I tend to agree.
The problem is that some abstract concepts are just
plain harder to draw than real-life objects, no matter
how uncommon that real-life object is. The words do
balance out over time, but if this is an issue for you
then you could always give each player the option of
calling for one “mulligan” (i.e. choose
a different Squint Card) per game, should they wish
to.
Overall, I’d recommend Squint to anyone searching
for a good party-type game. The
laughs are plentiful when playing this game, and for
once they’re not laughing at my rendition of a
bear…
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