Components:  72 shape cards, 168 Squint cards (items to draw), 80 scoring chips, a die (6-sides, numbered 1-3), a timer, card tray and rules.  Components are of high quality.  Cards are thick and glossy.  All of the components follow a blue and green color scheme, including green sand in the blue hour-glass.  Overall, Squint is very attractive on the table.

Price: $19.95US  

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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 was fun.  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).

- Tolen Dante

(August 26, 2002)