Got Five! – Finding Familiar Figures’ Factual Flow

Five is a special number for us humans. We’ve got high fives, low fives, we need to take five, we as board gamers even like the challenge of a five-by-five. I don’t know if it’s because we’ve got five fingers on each hand, or what, but five seems to appear an awful lot in our lives.

In Got Five from Blue Orange, you’ll have to figure out five numbers. Five specific numbers, in fact, lined up in order in front of you – but arranged so you can’t see them, only your opponents can. This simple but clever deduction game was designed by Yoann Levet. 2-5 players age 8+ can play Got Five!, and it’ll only take about 15 minutes.

Setup

Got Five! only has a few different kinds of pieces. First, each player will take a player screen, a player board, and a tile stand. Then, pour out all the adorable number tiles in the middle of the table. Flip them over so the numbers are not visible, and mix them around.

Take five tiles – one of each color – and stands them up so the number is facing away from them. Ask another player to arrange them in order from lowest to highest and put them into order in the tile stand from the minus (-) sign to the plus (+) sign.

Finally, flip one tile of each color over as a common set of known tiles.

Grab an erasable marker and mark off these known numbers from your player board. There’s only one of each number so you know your tiles can’t possibly be the ones you can see on the table and on your opponents’ stands. Now it’s time to begin!

Gameplay

Starting with the youngest player, you’ll each do two things on your turn. First, flip over any one face-down tile. Show it to everyone so they can cross it off their board.

Then, select any one of the six face-up tiles and use it to request a clue. You can either ask another player to sort the tile or compare the tile.

When sorting, give the tile to another player and have them place it in front of your tile stand in between two tiles. This shows where that tile would fit in the range. This is valuable deductive information!

When comparing, take the tile you’ve chosen and hold it above one of the tiles in your stand. Ask another player if it matches the tile below it or not. For two tiles to match, the dots at the bottom of the tile have to be the same: one, two, or three dots. Once again, this is a powerful deductive tool that allows you to eliminate potential options from your board.

At any time, if you think you’ve got all five numbers, shout “GOT FIVE!”. Name your numbers in sequential order. If you get them right, you win! But if not, you’ve automatically lost and you’re out. Everyone else can keep going.

Impressions

We really enjoy deduction games at The Family Gamers, to the point where we dedicated a show to them about five years ago. Got Five! is a brilliantly fast game that channels simple deduction games like Hanabi, but with less dexterity required and a lot more record-keeping allowed.

Blue Orange has managed to even shoehorn some personality into a game that could otherwise be fairly dry. Look at these adorable eyes!

One of the best features of Got Five! is that it’s a perfect information game. While it’s still deductive reasoning through-and-through, Got Five! supports the all-too-common situation at home where a parent gets called away by someone else, or a child needs to rush to the potty. All of the information is available when you return, so you don’t have to keep everything in your head, or remember the way you arranged a particular item to remind you of some random fact.

The speed of Got Five!, the perfect information, and the plentiful helpers allowing you to keep track of your progress make Got Five! an absolute win for families. We actually played this one four times back-to-back-to-back-to-back one night because it was so fun and so fast.

Pick up your own copy of Got Five! on Amazon or at your friendly local game store.

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Blue Orange Games provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of Got Five! for this review.

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