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Exakto

[Exakto]

Author:
Reinhard Staupe

Publisher:
Nürnberger Spielekartenverlag (NSV)
2022

EVALUATION

[Complexity]
[Design]
[Interaction]
[Strategy]
[Evaluation]


G@mebox author Ralf Togler writes about the game:

Today I’d like to draw your attention to a very small game, actually a very easy children game. You might even ask if that’s really game, because there is so little to do. You just have to guess distances. More precisely: you have to compare the distance between two holes on one card with the distance of coloured circles on another card.

Honestly, I nearly left out this game, if the small Nürnberger Spieleverlag (NSV) weren’t its publisher. The same company that made the award-winning The Game and the minimalistic The Mind. Missing this game would have been a fault, that’s what I was thinking. And it’s true, at least if you have (smaller) children. To be honest, I was fascinated about how some of the children I played the game with constantly guessed the right distance. I really had to go the one or other extra mile to claim victory.

But let’s see what’s inside: the game contains 15 thick unique cards, nearly the size as the gamebox, each with two holes. On the one side of the card we find eight coloured circles, on the other side there is only a pencil and a yardstick as a flavour sketch. Every round, you take two cards, one face up with the coloured circles and the other face down with only the flavour sketch and the two holes visible.

[Exacto]

Click on image to enlarge!

Then, the player in turn has to choose two of the coloured circles on the one card that might fit to the distance of the two holes on the other card, of course without measuring it. Only your eyes are allowed to use, no other tool like your fingers (smaller children tend to use them still, I would tell that’s ok for the sake of the fun of the game). After naming the circles it’s time to see if the guess was correct. For this purpose, the player takes the face-down card and overlays it on the face-up card on top of the two circles chosen by the player.

If the guess was correct, the card goes to the guessing player as a victory point. The face-up card is flipped and a new face-up card is drawn to start the next turn. If, however, the guess was wrong, the next player in line can make a new guess until the distance was correctly predicted. The game ends when the last card has been taken from the stack of unused cards. That’s after about 15 minutes.

[Exacto]

Click on image to enlarge!

As said, Exacto is a very simple game. But I was totally surprised how hard it would be to guess the right distance. My first thought was that this would be much too easy for the grown-ups, pure kid’s staff, but I was totally wrong. I was often beaten by young children, and I even played the game several times only with my wife, without any children, because it was so funny. The quality of the cards is extraordinary for such a small game. Additionally, the game has a new box design that gets along without any plastic. A sustainable new line from the NSV publisher. Exacto once again has convinced me that simple game concepts and children games in particular can fascinate young and old boardgamers likewise. Excellent to play with the children.


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Copyright © 2023 Ralf Togler & Frank Schulte-Kulkmann, Essen, Germany