SNAP Review – Flip-Pix!

Game

Flip-Pix! is a fast-moving card game for 2-6 players, ages 6 and up. It was invented by Martin Nedergaard Andersen and is published by Amigo.

Art

At first glance, Flip-Pix! bears a striking resemblance to Spot It: circular cards, several pictures on them. But in Flip-Pix!, the images are all roughly the same size – and there are letters on the reverse! That’s different – how do we play?

Mechanics

Amigo promises that their kids’ games have 5 or fewer rules, and this one definitely fits that requirement.

Divide up the cards more-or-less evenly among all the players, with a single card on the table to start the game. Flip that one card to the picture side, and everyone tries to find a thing on that card that starts with a letter in their hand.

As soon as you find a match, shout out the word and put your card letter-side up on the table. Now everyone should look in their hands for a picture that could start with one of the available letters.

If the match you play includes a red letter, you get to discard an extra card from your hand.

Go back and forth, alternating letter cards with picture cards, until someone has emptied their hand.

And that’s it! It’s very simple.

Expectations

Given the look of Flip-Pix! – especially the round cards – we expected a game that’s something like Spot It. And once I saw the letters, I also expected something like Anomia Kids, matching sounds with pictures.

Since there are letters, we figured a little bit of reading skill would be required.

Surprises

[Anitra] For me, flipping the cards in my hand (from pictures to letters and back to pictures) really slows me down. I ended up just holding a few cards at a time so I wasn’t trying to leaf through 10 or more and flip the whole stack over and over again.

With younger kids, I’d suggest laying out cards in two piles in front of them on the table – one with letters and one with pictures.

And that’s another surprise – observation skills are not enough! You need to be able to come up with a word that ties together a letter with a picture. This was surprising – the combination of skills needed means that kids (or parents) who normally aren’t good at speed games might do well.

Or, in my case (Andrew), the reverse. What happened to me was, I’d run through 3-4 cards and then I’d be stuck just “uh, uh, uh” (staring at cards) for a really long time.

It definitely gets easier as you whittle down your hand of cards, because there is less to focus on all at once.

Recommended

Flip-Pix! is a fun game to play with a family. We had tense moments where everyone stared at the cards, but also times where the cards were played out fast and furious with lots of back-and-forth action.

Since Flip-Pix! is so small and so fast-moving, it makes a great game to keep on hand for playing when you have a few minutes’ down time, like at a restaurant. And the letter-picture combinations make it a good way to reinforce early reading decoding skills with younger kids.

We did some house-rule shifts to keep things fair when playing with younger kids or players who had a reading disadvantage – giving them fewer cards to start with, or playing in a more deliberate, less speedy way.

The goal of the game is to get rid of all the cards in your hand, and the first one to do that wins; so that was a really easy way to rule-shift for our younger players.

Find Flip-Pix! for about $10 on the Amigo website or at major retailers like Kohl’s, Macy’s, or Barnes & Noble.

We give Flip-Pix! 4 pictures out of 5.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Flip-Pix! from Amigo Games for this review.