Slam It! Family Friendly Game | Review

[Ad- gifted product] There’s a lot of different tabletop games out there now, and more people than ever playing them. Slam It! from Ideal is certainly a bit more Table Top Toy rather than a board game, but it was a welcome addition to the physical games rotation that we’ve set up with the kids this year.

Slam It! has a lot going for it. Much like a lot of Ideal’s current kids range it is designed to be compact, contained and quick to learn. Once the outer packaging is removed Slam It! is reduced to a simple yellow case which clicks open and shut. Within it, there are pre-divided compartments, where you can separate out the cards which are introduced in each of the different difficulty games. Some of these are bombs, others reverse the direction of play and others mean that a turn is skipped. It’s incredibly simple to pick up and play, as simple as Say it, See it, Slam it.

At its most core — which it doesn’t get much deeper than, to be honest — it is a counting game. The deck is split between each player evenly following a good shuffle, from there a player places a card and says the number 0. The next player then plays their top card and says the next number, 1. This continues until either the number 9 is reached, in which case players start again from 0, or the number that is said matches the number on the card. At this point, the player who gets their hand to the card last has to collect up the cards and add them to their pile. The first player to zero cards wins.

We played through the core game, which the kids all really enjoyed. Where Slam it! can get really interesting however is in the addition of extra cards, through harder difficulty modes. Adding bombs, rotation and skipping into the deck means that there are extra rules rattling around in your head, making the Snap-style gameplay a little bit more complex, and adding a reason to hesitate into the pile.

I said before that the appearance of the recent Ideal Games issuing is great, Slam It!, much like Grabalo, 7ate9 and Pointz, has such a smart, self-contained design that I can’t really praise it enough. Much like those other games, the design continues all the way through to the instructions on the cards — or, in this case, the numbers and symbols, are sleek, clear and easy to understand. I think that’s all you can hope for in a family game.

You can find Slam It! on Amazon.

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