First Impressions of Glimpse

At Essen I got a little glimpse of Glimpse, a family game from British publishers, Legend Express. Effectively it’s a cross between Codenames and Unusual Suspects, but with the stated aim of teaching kids (and big kids) about colour blindness. Any game trying to work in an educational message like this is worth a closer look, and Glimpse lets you do it while wearing a pair of silly glasses. Off to a flying start already I’d say.

These glasses have red filters that turn the world a bright shade of red, like so:

The aim of the game when you’re wearing the glasses is to figure out which of the collection of mug shots are your friends. You must be the new kid at school, or suffering from some terrible amnesia or something… who knows. Regardless, you’ll do this by asking your real friends (or random assortment of players) who aren’t wearing glasses a question from the deck of question cards. Maybe it’ll be “what would they order in a pizza restaurant?” or “what is their favourite sport?” Your friends will then try and respond in such a way as to point you towards one of the pictures that has your team’s marker on it without directly describing them. Of course, the red glasses make it impossible for you to distinguish the different coloured discs so you are entirely reliant on the guidance of your friends. Inevitably, just like in Codenames, this will go completely wrong!

A simple red tint seems like a fairly ham-fisted way of simulating colour blindness, but it is immediately striking that two colours you can normally distinguish are turned completely identical. Obviously that’s not what colour blindness is, but this isn’t meant to be a simulation. It’s a prompt, and it’s really effective. It’s a fun, elegant way of making even you or I think about these issues and I can see this being a really great way of making kids aware of them.

The one problem I do see with Glimpse is the same problem Unusual Suspects has. You are basically judging people based on their looks. That’s going to make some people uncomfortable and I do have to ask whether it’s something we should be encouraging in kids. But the questions are generally innocuous and it’s all intended in good spirits. I definitely had fun with Glimpse, but do keep these potential issues in mind.

This First Impressions article is based on a demo of the game at Essen 2016. Check out the other games I got to play here!