Blind Spot by Sparkworks Games

We keep a pretty large collection of words games in our home, various versions of Scrabble, Upwords, Bananagrams, along with several others, and we are big fans of puzzles and always enjoy a good word jumble. Blind Spot brought something new to the table that we found challenging and fun to play at the same time.There are 18 double sided tiles that you arrange in a 3x3 grid, although for a longer game it is a lot of fun to make a larger 4x4 grid, or if you wanted even more variety as you play a 3x6 grid. These are not official variants but we found we could play around with the tiles in this way to come up with a longer game that then makes larger words eventually become easier to use. I liked the flexibility to make this into whatever we wanted without altering any actual game play rules.This isn't your regular word jumble, you aren't merely looking to find words, but you must find words by removing letters that do not belong. Players will cover up a single letter on their turn, if they can, during the 30 second timer to pick out and orthogonally readable word. Play passes to other players who do the same. The chips, or Blind Spots, you place on the board are a bit of an area control mechanic. On future turns you can expand and build upon words by only by reading words across your spots you've placed on the board and not those of any other opponent. So you get the chance to lock down the playing area a bit if you yourself can find words in various places and do a bit of cornering against other players. This incredibly tiny bit of confrontation is friendly and random as your ability to spot words while working against the timer can be rather difficult sometimes.The two player variant works remarkably well and we've enjoyed many games of this together. Other rules which let you place an extra chip if you make a five letter word, and a rule game ending rule where once you lose to the timer you can then begin to spot diagonally readable words is exciting. Having access to look for words on the diagonal opens up a lot more opportunities for finding matches, however it does come at the cost that you've already exhausted 1 of your 2 chips that once placed will end the game for you.Great for any puzzle lover in your family or game group and easily approachable by gamers of any age who have good reading skills and don't get too stressed out over the timer! Some of our funniest moments are finding a word right after someone calls time over on us, I think our own “blind spot” is not being able to watch the timer while we search for words at the same time!

I’m so sad that no one has reviewed this game. I picked this up at Barnes & Noble. I have a pretty large board game collection but my wife doesn’t like to play most of them so I’m always trying to find something she’ll like. My wife and I play a lot of 2 player card and word games together so I thought I would give this one a try. It’s really hard to find good ones though and so I didn’t have my hopes set to high. But this game is awesome!! Looking at the simple rules I think the solo mode and 3-4 player mode look equally good. I’ll try to update after we’ve tried them. Note: Rules are usually the biggest barrier to entry. After I opened the box we were up and playing in less than 10 minutes ... sigh ... happy ... awesomeness!!

My family and I just finished playing this word game and it was so much fun for a bunch of word-loving folks like us. I'm not good at Scrabble but I'm great at this! It's like Mastermind meets Scrabble meets Crossword puzzles. I give this game 5 stars!