Pyramid Magazine
Andy Vetromile
September 2002
USA

Pyramid Pick: Squint, Published by Out of the Box Publishing, Inc., $19.95

Some games, once they come out, seem so obvious you wonder why someone didn't think of them before. In the case of Squint, from Out of the Box Games, someone sort of did; the game was called Pictionary, and it required you to use whatever (usually minimal) artistic skills you had to sketch the clues your teammates needed to guess the right answers.

But you don't draw in this game. There's no pad, pens, or pencils, and you won't hear anyone lamenting, "But I don't know how to draw!" (You'll have to come up with a new excuse.) You still have cards to tell you what you must convey to the other players, but the mechanic is more unusual.

When a player takes his turn, he draws one of the 168 Squint cards. Each card has three items, numbered 1 to 3. The 1 items are fairly straightforward -- beard, hand, car, cat, eye -- and are worth fewer points. 3s are worth more, but are tougher to do: pickle, coffin, adhesive bandage. 2s fall somewhere in the middle. A specialized 6-sided die randomly determines which of the items the player must represent (1s are more likely with the die than 3s). The object of the game is to score points by getting others to guess what is being depicted, but rather than drawing from scratch, the chosen player has to draw the images using tiles from a pool of 72 shape cards.

The shape cards have a variety of figures or images on them, and resemble the Zener cards used to measure psychic abilities. There are straight lines, curved lines, wavy lines, circles, angles, a trident: a solid selection of shapes that ensures the arranger has almost, but not quite, what he needs to finish the job. When he begins putting together the artwork, the hourglass timer gets flipped over. If no one guesses what is being "drawn" before the clock runs out -- about 45 seconds -- no points are awarded. If someone deduces the item, both that person and the arranger get points equal to the numbered item; if the player who's up rolled a 2, he pieced together the number 2 item on the card, and the two successful players get two points each. The game comes with 80 little Tiddlywinks-esque plastic chits to keep track of points.

Each person gets to take a turn at being the artist during a single round. After playing a set number of rounds, everyone adds up the tokens, and whoever has the most tokens wins. If there's a tie, the tied players compete in one more contest to see who can guess a neutral party's attempt at a picture.

The game plays quickly, and the timer runs out very quickly, allowing the group to play several rounds in short order -- as little as 10 minutes for a three-player game. Everyone gets to participate at once, which is nice because participants are never sitting around waiting for a turn; however, in larger games many people will be shouting out answers. The shape cards provide a good spread of images, but the game designers knew not to be too generous; most of what an arranger needs is there, but it's a tight enough selection that it'll be a maddening time trying to find something that looks like a pair of cat ears, especially if he has already used the little arrow bumps as the whiskers. There will also probably be a lot of head shaking as players argue, "High heels is easier to portray than turkey? I think not," but such arguments are inevitable and part of the fun.

The package is good for twenty bucks. The timer is an expense buyers might have preferred not to cover, and the die is specialized while not totally foreign. As an aside, anyone looking for the cute John Kovalic cartoon artwork that characterizes many Out of the Box products needn't bother; this game doesn't really merit them, and the less confusion in the graphics, the better.

Out of the Box has a habit of making games that seem so absurdly simple and straightforward you wonder why someone hasn't done them already. Squint is one of those games. It takes a game concept, adds a strange new dimension to it, and comes out with a challenging outlet for creativity that the rest of us might have seen, had we looked at it in a slightly different way.

And, yes, it helps to squint.

Back to Squint Reviews page