Review – Spotlight

Spotlight is a cooperative hidden-pictures game for up to 5 players. In it, players use “magic flashlights” to look around a picture, illuminating one section at a time. Can you find all the matching characters before time runs out?

Review

As my children reach the age where they can grasp light family games, I am always on the lookout for new ones to try with them. Spotlight caught my attention because of its super-unique central mechanism.

This game is played using translucent images, each of which depicts part of a Where’s Waldo-type scene. Every player has their own piece of the larger picture, and they use “magic flashlights” to explore it.

The flashlights are really just cardstock, but when put underneath the translucency, the white circle highlights an area of the picture, as if a flashlight was shining on it.

The game is played over 5 rounds. To begin a round, a card is drawn, which shows a character from the scene (e.g. the mummy or the police officer). Every character appears multiple times on each player board, some as many as 10.

After the card is drawn, the sand timer is flipped, and players have 30 seconds to look around their section of the picture. As they do so, they keep track of how many times they see the current character.

When time runs out, each player enters their number on a dial, and the character card is flipped over to reveal how many times (and where) the character actually appears.

Based on the number they entered, each player will move up to 4 spaces along the movement track, which is built into the game box. After that, the moon piece (game timer) is moved along the track. The moon moves based on a die roll, plus a possible modifier from the character card, and it “chases” players along the track. Players always want to stay ahead of the moon, and once per round, a player can give 1 of their movement points to someone else, to give that player a boost. (This is especially helpful when playing with kids.)

If the moon “catches” someone on the track, players must spend a Rush token, which are in limited supply. Rush tokens allow a player whom the moon has passed to jump ahead of the moon. However, if the moon catches someone and no more rush tokens are available, players lose. Otherwise, if they last 5 rounds, players win! (There is a scoring system if they are interested in how well they did.)

---

Spotlight is a cool game, and I’m amazed I haven’t seen its translucency trick used before. This game feels a bit like MicroMacro, but unlike that game, in which players try to piece together a story based on visual clues, Spotlight is simply about finding hidden pictures. This makes it, I believe, better suited than MicroMacro for playing with young kids.

The flashlight effect is awesome, but as the game rules will tell you, it is critical to have proper lighting when playing Spotlight. If the room is too bright, players will be able to see the entire picture on their board, rendering the game nigh unplayable. On the contrary, if it is too dark, the flashlight will not show up well. Players should ideally be in an environment with soft, indirect light, even better if the light is adjustable/dimmable.

During my initial rules read-through, I was concerned that this game would have a limited lifespan. After all, wouldn’t players eventually just memorize how many times each character appears? Well, it turns out that Spotlight cleverly heads off this problem. If a player reaches the point where they know the answers, they can play with a handicap. During setup, the player randomly chooses a quadrant of their board to ignore—they cannot search there, and they treat it as if it doesn’t exist. Doing so forces the player to actually have to search, since the number they remember from the card is no longer accurate. (It also makes the game harder, as finding fewer characters means moving slower on the track, and that puts extra pressure on players from the moon.) It’s a great solution to a potential problem.

As far as players memorizing where characters are in the scene, this could theoretically happen, but with 5 unique boards, I don’t see it being a big issue. (And frankly, if someone played this game enough to have the whole scene memorized, they have probably gotten their money’s worth!)

Bottom line, Spotlight is a cool and unique game. It’s not the first Where’s Waldo-style game I have seen, but its flashlight effect—though a bit fragile—differentiates it from the rest. I wouldn’t recommend this game for an all-adult group, as I worry the novelty might wear off quickly, but for kids and families, it is definitely worth a try. (My kids love it!)

A review copy was provided by Flat River Group.