Spotlight 

• Designers: Hjalmar Hach, Lorenzo Silva
• Publisher: Horrible Guild
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 6+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Played with copy provided by publisher

Spotlight is a co-operative hidden object game in which you and your friends search with your trusty flashlight for wacky characters and items hidden in dark places brimming with absurd things. Your goal is to find as many as possible to advance your pawns on the track and cross the finish line, without any player being reached by the Moon pawn that is chasing you.

The game is played over five rounds. Each player has a different board composed of a transparent layer on top, depicting a different part of the game scene, and a black cardboard background, that makes everything dark and difficult to see.  Each player gets a flashlight, dial and a pawn of their color.  N+2 rush tokens are placed on the table.  The sand timer and the Moon die are also nearby.  The moon pawn starts on the moon space of the scoring track while all the player pawns start on the starred space.

At the beginning of each round, the hidden picture to search is determined by looking at the card on top of the deck. When everybody is ready, flip the sand timer and players start looking for the hidden picture on their board with their “magic” flashlight, which can illuminate the board thanks to its white spot.

This is a little deceiving – the film is much darker in real life.

When the sand timer runs out, players must stop searching, put down their flashlights, and set their dial on the number of hidden pictures they think they have found – yes this means there can be multiple copies of that illustration on your board (and they might be in slightly different poses)!  While you are searching, be sure not to give any clues/hints to other players.  Don’t mention when you find things and certainly don’t mention how many things you found…  

Now, players take their dial and spin it to the number of pictures they thought they found.  Then, they reveal the back side of the hidden picture card, which shows how many it was actually possible to find. The more you find the picture, the more your pawn advances on the track…but beware, the Moon pawn will advance, too!  If you find exactly the right number of images, give yourself a +1 bonus.  If you somehow mark down more images than actually exist, then you fail this round and do not move forward at all.  After movement, any one player in the lead may drop back one space to let the last place player move forward a space.

Now, check the back of the card and see if there are any moon icons underneath the number.  If so, you’ll roll the Moon die for each icon seen.   Each roll could cause the Moon to move 1 or 2 steps – or it could sap the battery power of your lights for the next round.   If the Moon overtakes any player’s pawn, you can spend a rush token to get them back in front of the Moon, but if you lack rush tokens, the game is over and you all lose! If all players cross the finish line without being caught by the Moon, you all win!

The team’s final score is calculated by adding up the number of Rush tokens still available and the number of spaces between the Moon and the last placed player.  The ultimate goal is to score ten or more points.

After you have played a few times, you can make the game more difficult by lowering the amount of time for each round or adding in mandatory moon movement.  You can also make the game more difficult my blocking off a quadrant of the board each round – so that you’ll never be able to find all the things…

You can also play the Competitive version where every player is on their own, and the winner of the previous round is forced to play with the low battery side in the next round.  See who scores the most points in 5 rounds!

My thoughts on the game

Haha! This game was made for my gameroom…. From the rules “We suggest that you play in a not-too-bright room to increase the magic effects of the flashlights. Avoid placing yourself under a strong light source”.  With that caveat in mind, I played the game in our usual dim conditions – and, it worked great!  The images are printed on the back side of the dark grey overlay, so when you move the white circle of the flashlight underneath it, everything becomes visible.  It’s a super neat system.  

It is a lot of fun to drive your flashlight around and look for the character in question.  It can be more challenging than you think because the characters might be turned in different directions or in a different pose than what you see on the card.  As such, you really have to concentrate on the super-busy image as you whip your light around.

This is a fun little challenge of moving the spotlight around your board trying to see all the different variations of the target illustration.  There are 60 cards in total in the box, so while I’m sure that players might eventually remember some of them; unless you’re playing every day, I feel like this is unlikely.

With the base rules, you have time to scan around the board and look for the pictures. Possibly enough time to also go back and double check areas.  If you find that players are getting too good at the game, you can definitely reduce the amount of time allowed for the round; or possibly handicap good players by blocking off a quadrant, etc.  The game provides you plenty of ways to change up the difficulty.  I will say that for adults, the base level of difficulty in the coop game is not challenging at all.

With a game like this, there is always the question of whether this is an activity or a game… In the cooperative version, it might lean a bit more towards the activity end of the spectrum.  It essentially becomes a race between the moon and the last place player (who always gets a +1 from the leader each round).  Will you end up having enough Rush tokens to keep leapfrogging the last place player(s) ahead of the moon?  There is definitely more of a game in the Competitive version with the direct competition. The game already handicaps the winner of a previous round, but if this isn’t enough, there are still ways to level the playing field.

You can make the game more difficult by shortening the timer or increasing the number of steps that the moon gets to take automatically,  There is also a system where you exclude one quadrant of the board from your investigation.  That idea seems neat in concept, but I really with the quadrant grid had been printed on the overlay sheet so it was easier to know when you would be crossing over into forbidden territory.

Spotlight has been really enjoyable, and I can definitely see this as a great activity/game for family events and with kids.  The artwork is fantastic and so detailed, and the game provides you enough ways to modify the game to make it competitive and interesting.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Steph H
• Neutral.  John P
• Not for me…