The other day, Karen came home with a game she had found at Barnes & Noble called SideLinks. Published by Outset, the game plays 2 to 5 people in about 25 minutes.
Somewhat like So Clover!, this game has you trying to associate random words to get points with better scores coming when you can make your card work with more than one pair.
How to Play
The game setup is to simply lay out four cards from the top of the deck with corners touching, leaving a single space for a card in the middle. Each player is then dealt five cards and the game begins.
The first player must place one of the cards in their hand next to a card on the table, associating the two words where the sides meet. This can be obvious like, in the picture, where “wolf” and “zoo” meet or it can be a little more esoteric with “wine” and “fruit” (wine is made out of fruit).
The score for the play is the total of the two numbers on the cards of the associated words. In the case of either of the examples, it would be four points.
The aim, though, is to find more than one word combination in a single play. In the example, a player put down the card with “rock” and “dolphin” on it so it associated with “coal” (coal is a rock) and “fisherman” (a man fishing at sea could see a dolphin). The score for that play would be 11, the total for the three cards, times two, because you matched two words, for 22.
If you find a way to match three sides (which we haven’t achieved yet), you would get the total of the four cards involved times three and, for the person who is especially clever (or lucky), if you can put a card in the middle of the four original cards on the table, you would get the total of the five cards involved times TEN.
According to the designers (whomever they are as they aren’t listed on the box), the words on the lower scoring cards are easier and more universal while those on the highest (5) cards are the hardest to match.
You can challenge a word association which leads to a discussion between the other players and an eventual vote on whether to allow the play. While the “dolphin”/”fisherman” example might lead to a discussion but eventually be approved, don’t go too far in into your imagination. If someone were to match, say, “rock” and “wind”, they probably won’t get away with “if you break the rock down into individual molecules, the wind would blow it away”.
Any player who finds themselves unable to come up with a play will take the top card from the deck and can play it immediately if they find a match.
The game keeps going until someone plays the last card out of their hand. All players get one more turn which is followed by adding up the total number of points scored and subtracting the points on any cards still in your hand. High score wins.
The game also comes with three variations in play:
- Place cards on the table in a 4×4 grid. A player calls out an association on the exposed cards and picks them up, replacing them with ones from a stack of predetermined number (depending on the length of the game you want to play). Play continues until there are no cards or no valid associations left. Winner has the highest total of the values on their cards.
- Place cards face down in a 3×3 grid. A player flips over two cards and has 30 seconds to find a valid association. If not, the cards are flipped back and the next player tries. This version, obviously, is for the person who can remember the cards that have been shown so far for future turns. Once again, you can have extra cards to replace those scored.
- Each player starts with four cards. One puts a card on the table and the next player tries to find an association. If successful, they take the cards, both players draw back up to four, and the scoring player puts a card on the table for the next person. If not successful, they can replace the card in the center with one from their hand. The game continues until there are no more cards to replenish the hands.
Components
The game comes with 140 cards, each with four words. With shuffling, that should be enough to play many times without too much duplication. There is also a score pad and a pencil.
The price point on the game is relatively low, somewhere in the mid-teens, so I didn’t have great expectations but I was a little disappointed with the word cards. While the top side has a slight glossy finish, the actual word side is raw cardboard. It’s not like there is a lot of shuffling in the game, but it would have been nice if both sides had a finish.
In Conclusion
I really wasn’t thinking that this game was going to be some revelatory experience. I even had thoughts that it was probably going to be pretty bad but, in the end, we actually enjoyed the experience. There’s quite a bit of thinking that goes into finding associations and the extra challenge to match more than one word for bigger scores had us with a few lengthy study sessions. You might even want to consider adding a timer to the game if you play with an analysis paralysis prone person.
Not a game that will shake the world, but an enjoyable experience for a few plays at a time.
Rating: 7 out of 10
