Slam It! Review

Slam it! Is a fast paced, card matching, family friendly, party card game. The game can be played in small or large groups. It's suitable for gamers from around five up and takes 10-20 minutes to play. The game needs fast reflexes a keen eye for detail and has a great set of rules that allow you to set the difficulty level of the game for your group. Or train the group and develop up to the trickiest, but most fun version, Pro Slam!

This is suitable for 2-8 players from Ideal Games.

Slam It Overview

The game is simple, the core cards are coloured and numbered (from 0-9). All the cards are dealt out to the players and the first player plays their first card whilst saying zero. The next player plays their card and says one. Play continues in this fashion and the number count goes up to nine and then back to zero. As soon as a player plays a card that matches the number that they said, all players have to slam their hand on the deck. The last player to slam, gains the pile. The game restarts as does the count. The first player to get rid of all their cards wins the game.

What I really like about the game is the way you go up through the levels of difficulty. The intermediate game introduces new cards to the stack that reverse the order and skip players. This means you need to be alert and keep on your toes. However, it is when you get to the Pro level where Slam it! really starts to shine. At this point you introduce the bomb cards into the deck and place the additional rule cards onto the play area face down, adding the game over card somewhere near the top (suggested around five cards down).

Play continues in exactly the same way but whenever a bomb card is played to the stack you need to be careful… When the stack is slammed the bomb goes off and a new rule is added. These are just brilliant adding some really brain bending thinking to the game. Certain colours don’t follow the normal rules, when you reverse play you start counting in the opposite way, individual cards numbers now mean something else.

All this makes a fast and frenetic game even more crazy. Each time a new bomb explodes, the player can replace or add to the rule set so you can conceivably have a game with four or five new rules all running in parallel.

When the game over card is uncovered, following a bomb explosion, the player with the most cards is the loser! There is no winner in this version of the game. With the number of rules and random way they can be drawn and chained there is a lot of replayability.

Slam it is bright well designed and so much fun. It requires fast thought, quick hands and great reactions. It is a great party game which will keep gamers, young and old entertained and even amongst solid gamers is a brilliant fun filler. Component quality is good. With good card stock being used and the plastic box is great with dividers inside meaning you can keep the various level cards separate for easy setup.

This is be a game well worth adding to your collection and delivers a hefty punch of fun for amazing value. So what on earth are you waiting for? Get those cards dealt out, starting flipping and make sure you are not the last person to Slam it!

Don't forget to check out our Q&A with Alice and Nick, the designers of Slam It!