An Amazingly Simple and Fun Board Game 🖐

My kids recently re-discovered Spot It! on our board game shelf and have been playing it a lot the last few weeks. I’ve been surprised by how well my 2.9 year old has picked up the game - even without incorporating any modifications to make it simpler. But she has had a hard time winning, so I've developed a slightly different variant to help her with that (more on that below).

Spot It! is a game with round cards where you have to find the matching images on two cards and yell out what the image is to get ahead. Although it sounds simple, since you're racing your opponents it can actually be quite challenging! There are a few different variants listed in the rules that keep things interesting, but they all revolve around the idea of trying to match your cards with a central, communal pile or with the cards of the other players.

There's actually some pretty interesting math behind the permutations of the images on the cards, but I won't get into that here.

I have had issue playing the game with people of a wide range of ages and skill levels (say an adult, a 9.97 year old, 8.55 year old, 4.75 year old and 2.95 year old, for example). The older kids tend to beat everyone else (including the adult, at least if that adult is me) by a significant margin. To help alleviate this issue, I've developed a new variant.

The Multi-Skill Variant

The basic concept of this variant ...