It's a Match!
- Board's Eye View
- 18 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Every so often we come across a game that's essentially a psychology experiment. For example, Stroop (Grand Gamers Guild) and Social Ladder (Hot House Games). Cranio Creations have particular form here: we've described their Unusual Suspects as an exercise in racial profiling and stereotyping. Federico Latini's It's a Match! is a Dixit-style game from Cranio Creations where, again, players are encouraged to indulge their prejudices.
Themed around dating apps, It's a Match! is a party game for 4-10 players. Everyone has a hand of five 'profile' cards: smartphone-formatted photos of men and women, giving their name and age. The players sitting to the immediate left and right of the active player are 'advisors'. They each draw two 'hashtag' cards, choose one and display it. They, and all the other players, all choose one of their profile pictures and play them face down. The active players shuffles all of them so they don't know who put in which picture, and they then choose and rank the three that they think best fit the hashtags. The players who put in the chosen profile pictures get points (3 for first choice, 2 for second, 1 for third) and the active player gets the same points as their two advisors. In this way, the active player is incentivised for paying close attention to the advisors' hashtag prompts.
The game comes with more than 100 profile and hashtag cards. The latter cover a very wide range of traits, hobbies and interests. The game works, and at one level it's a satirical comment on the superficiality of smartphone dating apps. But at its heart, It's a Match! is reinforcing stereotypes and prejudices, with players forming snap judgements from photos on who might, for example, be a #bookworm and who might be a #gamer.
We reckon It's a Match! is at its best with six or seven players; enough to make the Dixit-like picture selection a challenge but not so many that it could drag ensuring that everyone gets a turn as the active player.
