As you'll know from our reviews of Pegasus Spiele's MicroMacro Crime City games, we're suckers for Where's Wally/Where's Waldo style puzzlers so, with Spotlight, Horrible Guild were onto a winner with us from the outset.
The game is super simple. The 2-5 players each have their own board which has an array of colourful characters on it (yes, unlike the Crime City games, the illustrations in Spotlight are all in full colour) and each character is depicted multiple times, attractively illustrated by Giulia Ghigini. Each turn, a card is turned over to reveal which of the 60 possible characters needs to be found, and the players have to search out all the places on their board that that character appears and then record the number of appearances on their dial before the 60-second sand timer runs out. The reverse side of the card shows the number of times that character appears and players move forward on a track according to the accuracy of their searches. Of course you could 'cheat' and record on your dial a number higher than the number you actually found but you'll be pushing your luck because if the number on your dial exceeds the solution on the card, you don't move at all on the track.
Spotlight can be played competitively but it is first and foremost playable as a cooperative game where all the players are being chased by a moon token that moves the number of spaces shown on the card plus the number of spaces indicated on the roll of a custom d6 (1 or 2).
The boards all contain the same number of appearances of every character but each has the characters in different places. And in a nice touch if you're playing with argumentative players, the solution on the reverse of each card shows where all the characters are on all five of the boards, so disputes are easily remedied.
But we've left the best to last. The game is called Spotlight because you're searching for the characters using the torch beam of a flashlight. The boards appear on the face of it to be almost opaque. Players' flashlights are just lengths of card with a white circle on the end but, miraculously, when you slide them under the topsheet of the board you can see very clearly everything inside the white circle just as if it were illuminated by a torch beam. And the game incorporates an inbuilt handicap system: the reverse side of each flashlight has a smaller white circle on it: reducing the size of the beam makes your searching that much harder. There are no batteries included with this game; none are needed - the cardboard flashlights work seemingly like magic! Any children playing will be amazed but if your experience is anything like ours you can expect adults to be equally gobsmacked.
Tho' members of the Board's Eye View team all had a great time playing Spotlight, cynics in the team voiced concern that after a few plays you'd remember how many times particular characters appeared. Designers Lorenzo Silva and Hjalmar Hach have thought of that. The player boards are notionally divided into quadrants and if players have developed an over familiarity with the game, you can play using the quadrants with players each drawing a token that shows which of the four quadrants they should ignore. This means the solutions for any given character (still shown on the back of the card) will differ with each play.
With Spotlight, Horrible Guild have put together a simple but engaging game in an ingenious package. And unlike the Crime City games, there's no content in Spotlight that might upset or be in any way unsuitable for children.
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