Say it, see it … SLAM IT!
As a family we love to sit around the kitchen table playing board and tabletop games. We have a large collection of games with each of us having our own favourites. Sitting around and playing games together is a great way to spend some good quality family time, is lots of fun and also encourages everybody to converse with each and not just about the game being played but their day in general and anything else that happens to arise.
With the Christmas holidays now started and the evenings getting darker earlier (never mind how cold and wet they are), we have been looking through our game shelves and trying to play some of the games we haven’t played in a while. We recently tried and loved the tabletop game Sneak Peek and last night thought that we would try another card game and selected Slam It!
Slam It! from John Adams is a fast-paced card matching game, and it really is fast-paced! It is a game for 2-8 players, aged six years and upwards. It is a fast game with a playing time of between 10 and 20 minutes.
In the box:
- 1x Slam It! Storage Box
- 100x Cards made up of
– 60x Basic Cards (10x each of Blue, Green, Orange, Purple, Red and Yellow Cards)
– 8x Next Level Cards (4x Reverse Cards and 4x Skip Cards)
– 27x Pro Cards (4x Bomb, 22x Rule Cards, 1x Game Over Card)
– 2x Blank Cards
– 3x Different Levels Instructions Cards (Basic, Next Level and Pro) - Instructions Leaflet
With Slam It! there are 3 different difficulty levels to play the game so there is something to suit all age and ability ranges. The idea is to get rid of as many of your cards as possible by playing a card and counting in sequence from 0 to 9. Watch out though, when the card played matches the number spoken, players must slam their hands on the pile of cards. The last person to slam their hand down keeps the pile of cards! Say it, see it … SLAM IT!
Playing the basic level is quite straightforward but once you start adding in Next Level card or even Pro cards it starts to get really tricky.
Slam It! is a tabletop card game that comes in its own compartmentalised box with 100 cards. There are three compartments in the box so you can easily split the cards for the three different levels of play. The box is hard plastic, seems quite sturdy and is small enough to make it a travel game as well.
Basic gameplay (Level 1) uses the 60 coloured numbered cards only. These are all white-backed cards which are shuffled and dealt out to each player (coloured number side face-down). The cards do not have to be entirely equal between all players, they just all need to be dealt out. The player going first turns over the top card from their pile, places it in the middle of the table and says “Zero”. The next player turns over a card, lays it on top of the other in the middle of the table and says “One”. Then play continues around the table, with the number called out increasing by one with each turn. It doesn’t matter what the number on the card is, you just have to call out the numbers from 0 to 9 in sequence.
When the count matches the number of the top card, for example, when someone says 5 and then lays a 5 card, players should slam the pile. The last player to slam picks up the entire pile of cards and adds them to the bottom of their deck. The game then continues from the count of zero.
The first person to get rid of their cards is the winner.
We really enjoyed playing this level as the kids and adults all played on a level playing field and nobody felt at a disadvantage. The rules are easy to understand (even if sometimes you do forget to shout out the next number in the sequence and shout out the number on the card instead, not that I did this a few times).
Level 2 (Next Level) adds in 4 Reverse card and 4 Skip cards to the deck to change the difficulty level. When a Skip card is played, play skips to the next player. When a Reverse card is played, the order of play changes direction. This adds a small level of extra difficulty without changing the game too much and just makes that bit more interesting.
Level 3 (Pro) adds in the Next Level Reverse and Skip cards, Bomb cards, a Game Over card and Rule cards. Using all these cards does add a harder difficulty level to the game and takes a bit of figuring out to completely understand the gameplay. This was our least favourite level of the game, as we all had a bit of difficulty completely understanding the new playing method. That said, it does add an extra element of fun as well with Rule cards like if a yellow card is played, that player has to maintain a cheesy grin for the rest of the game or having players speak like pirates to ones that make the game far more difficult like treating blue cards as twos and two cards as blues!
Slam It! is excellent fun and the extra difficulty levels add a greater challenge to the game. Level 1 is perfect for 2 or more players but we found that levels 2 and 3 worked better when all four of us played together – the more the merrier!
Levels 1 and 2 were easy to understand and easy to play for all of us but level 3 with the addition of new cards addition combinations of rules to the game (they can be cumulative) are a bit tricky and can take a bit of understanding for the adults as well as the children. We would say levels 1 and 2 are perfect for children aged 6 and upwards with level 3 probably 10 years plus.
Slam It! is a good and fun pick up and play game for all the family that requires quick thinking.
Rating: 4.5/5
RRP: £12.99
For more information, visit www.johnadams.co.uk. Available to buy from Amazon here.
