Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Every now and then, I sit down to play a game with no expectations whatsoever. I anticipate neither excitement nor despair. I am absolutely ambivalent, a perfect blank slate. I think of this as a true neutral response, but it occurs to me that I generally enjoy trying new games, so ambivalence is in fact a moderately negative response. I’ll process this on my own time.
Ambivalence was very much the case with Got Five!, a deduction game from designer Yoann Levet and publisher Blue Orange. I picked up a review copy because it was the slow season, I knew it wouldn’t take long to play, and I liked the tiles. I don’t know which of the two credited artists, Mathieu Clauss and Simon Douchy, is responsible for them, but those colorful bakelite tombstones with expressive eyes are hard to resist.
Don’t be fooled. Their friendly exteriors harbor terrible secrets, by which I mean numbers between 1 and 60. If you think that doesn’t sound so bad, you probably like math. During setup, each player takes one tile in each of the five colors and stands them up so the numbers are visible to everyone else at the table. It is extremely important that you not see the numbers on your own tiles, since the goal of the game is to figure out what tiles you have.
Each player’s five tiles are placed in sequential order by another player. Very kind. One of the best things about Got Five! is the discipline with which it metes out information. Even without looking at the other player’s tiles, your brood of organized tiles already gives you a little bit of information. The numbers in Got Five! are evenly distributed amongst each of the five colors, and each player has a dry erase board, kept behind a privacy screen, on which they can see all of the options and keep track of what they know. If my lowest number is an orange tile, which could be any fifth number from 5 to 60, I already know that 1-4 aren’t options for the others, and I know my orange tile isn’t going to be 60.
Add to that the information you gain from other players’ visible tiles and the additional set of five tiles revealed during setup, and you can parse quite a bit from the jump. With four players, this might be my favorite part of Got Five!, the two or three minutes everyone spends processing their initial bits of information. It’s very satisfying. With the right set of initial tiles, the cascade can carry you much further than you’d expect. At four players, it almost feels like you might be able to get the answer right then and there if you’re clever enough. You can’t, of course, but the feeling is compelling enough.
Once all that is done, the game proper begins. Players take turns flipping over any one of the facedown tiles in the middle of the table and adding it to the initial pool of five. The active player chooses any one of the six tiles in that pool. They then either set it in front of their row of mystery tiles and say, “Sort,” in which case another player places the selected tile wherever it would fall on the number line, or they say, “Compare,” in which case the active player holds the chosen tile next to any one of their tiles and waits for an answer. Each tile has between one and three dots under the number, and Compare lets you know if the tile you’re holding and the tile next to it have the same number of dots or not.
The structure of each turn is magnificent. You can win any time, your turn or not, by shouting “Got Five!” and identifying all five of your tiles. That makes the start of each turn, the revealing of a tile, tense for all involved. The active player is both desperate for a lucky break—a revealed tile once allowed me to immediately eliminate 12 other tiles from contention—and desperate not to bequeath that lucky break on anyone else. Once that moment is past, each player gets to learn something that will help them and only them.
The cover of Got Five! mentions bingo, and is right to do so. There is something compulsive, sweaty, gambling hall–esque about Got Five! You aren’t splitting the atom. This isn’t Hooky. You don’t need a nap when you’re done. But you do get to feel clever, and clever in a way that makes you want to bring the car back around for another spin.
Are there issues? Sure, I guess so. If you’re intent on experiencing games as competitive experiences rather than social ones, there are problems. There’s a lot of luck involved. Clusters of numbers and extreme values can do a lot of quick work, whereas a more even spread can require more time. It is often the case that one player G(e)t(s) Five! on the same turn that other players would be about to. After one or two games, you will have seen all its secrets. This is all true. But what a tremendously boring way to go about the whole thing, to look at it like that. I rebuke myself for even considering those thoughts. Goodness, is Got Five! fun to play.
