Thoughts on Dobble

Our copy of Dobble was kindly provided to us by Esdevium Games. A note for our American audience: Dobble is the European name for Spot It, so called because Europeans don’t like to name anything in a sensible or straight forward way.

Dobble sells at a RRP of £12.99, and is available online or from your friendly local game store!

Do you remember Snap? I played it a load as a kid, often with my grandparents. You’d split a deck of cards and reveal them one at a time until a card matched the previous one. Then you’d race to shout “SNAP!” and slam your hand on to the pile of cards to take them? It was fun! But we all know the best bit was the race to grab the cards, and sometimes you’d have to wait ages for a match to appear… maybe never happening at all. I’ve not played snap in a long time.

What if someone took Snap and made it so that you were guaranteed to find matches. In fact what if every card would match.

Concerned reader: So you just have a deck of identical cards?

No! That would be awful. But every card does still match with every other!

Concerned reader: But Matt, how does that work?!

Well! To understand that, take a look at one of Dobble’s cards…

Each card is covered by 8 different sized and coloured symbols and, through the use of some kind of unspeakable dark magic (mathematics) they have arranged the symbols such that each card shares one and only one symbol with every other card in the deck. Each game of Dobble, and there are 5 different ways to play included in the tin, is focussed around trying to find the symbol that is shared between a pair of cards as quickly as possible. And it is absolute genius.

There is a sound players make when playing Dobble. Kind of like the sound a small mammal might make when attempting to lift something very heavy. It is the sound of their mind’s gears grinding to a halt as they. Just. Can’t. Find. The picture! It is truly amazing how hard this game can be, I mean you just need to find a matching picture right? Well there’s no easy way to grasp this until you’ve actually sat down and stared at a Dobble card in a state of perplexed shock, but let’s try a story.

When I first played Dobble it was just a 2-player game, so the time pressure wasn’t nearly as bad as is typical. It was going well, but then I came across a card I couldn’t match. Oh no. The game doesn’t work, I thought to myself. I’ve found the pair of cards that don’t match. I was convinced. I paused the game to compare them properly. It took us both a MINUTE AND A HALF to find the matching picture!

There is no logical reason why it should have proven so hard. No reason at all! Some cards you’ll get in a fraction of a second, some will prove nightmarishly stubborn. And this is a source of complete hilarity. As the high paced card-grabbing pauses because none of you can find a match, that’s not awkward, that’s hilarious. When one of your friends is screaming with frustration because they can’t shift this one card, that’s hilarious.

Then even when you spot a match you still have to shout out the name of the picture to claim the card, and suddenly you can’t remember what the hell it’s called. Red… leaf… Canada… THING IT’S MINE! Having your friend bouncing up and down in their seat trying to remember the name of a symbol only for another player to snatch it out from under them… guess what? That’s hilarious!

Really, we could leave it at that but because we are dedicated reviewers we’re going to break down each of the mini-games contained within. Let’s do this.

#1 The Towering Inferno

A great tower of cards sits in the middle of the table, you each have one. You’ll be engulfing the tower in your furious card-grabbing, adding them to your growing pile. Is the screaming from Dobbles trapped in the lift, or just your friends as you blaze through the tower? A brilliant introductory game and if you’re just a pair, this is probably the best game to play.

#2 The Well

What’s that Lassie? Little Dobble is stuck down the well? Oh no! Rescue him in this inversion of the Towering Inferno as you race to get rid of your pile of cards to form a central stack. An ever-changing central stack as your friends add to it, disrupting your play. Since the game is theoretically easier for whoever gets rid of their card, its not about winning, it’s about not coming last but, honestly, that’s just not as fun to play for. Fun, but more fun when you just play to win.

#3 The Hot Potato

Apparently hot potatoes are something you want to get rid of despite their deliciousness. I suppose these hot potatoes do have some weird growths on them – I wouldn’t eat a potato that has Dobble waving at me on it. Each player is dealt a card and then try and get rid of their cards by matching to any other player’s card. The last player left is burned by their friends’ mocking. A surprise hit, the relief of successfully getting rid of your card is palpable, and your friend’s anguished cry when they receive your card on top of theirs is just the icing on the… potato. The dealing out new cards slows things down a bit, but does build up the tension ahead of each round. Great, and it only gets more exciting with more players!

#4 Gotta Catch ‘em All

More dealing here: everyone gets a card and put one in the centre. Aim is to match any of the cards with the central card. When you do, take that card – not the middle one! – and keep guessing until it’s just that middle one left. Then re-deal, replacing the central card with a new one. Whoever collects the most cards over several rounds wins this and proves once and for all they have the most poké balls of the group. It is not only the fiddliest one to explain but also to set up each round, and almost certainly the weakest of the set because of that. Not bad, but not as good as the others.

#5 The Poisoned Gift

Won’t you take a bite of my delicious apple dearie? Set up identically to the Towering Inferno, this game has you match the top card of the central stack with any of your friend’s cards, giving them that central card. But of the course the aim is to have least at the end of the game, leading to a brilliant group dynamic where as soon as one player starts doing well everyone gangs up on them. Or whoever has been winning all the previous rounds. Except no one is being ganged up on for long and you soon have no idea what’s going on! Pure chaos and my favourite of the set.

Dobble comes in a bright yellow tin because it is made of pure gold. It is the perfect silly, chaotic filler. The quickest games won’t even take 5 minutes and it scales up to 8 brilliantly. At 2 or 3 you’ll miss out on some of the group dynamics but even there you have games that work well. It will make for a great family game since there isn’t really a barrier for entry for young kids. Now they may have designed their mascot after the monster from Pan’s Labyrinth, but it’s ok, your kids shouldn’t have seen that yet.

You may well think that Snap is just for kids, but Dobble really isn’t. The hilarity that comes out of the game’s core mechanism is pure and simple and driven by the game’s relentless pace. It elegantly walks the line between different age groups and player types. Really, everyone should have a copy of Dobble.