Some of the best games ever made aren’t built around some revolutionary new mechanic nobody has ever seen before. More often than not, new games are the result of taking a couple of familiar ideas, smashing them together, and discovering something that feels new. The fact is, most games aren’t trying to reinvent board game design; they just want to be something fun to play.

Maybe it’s Gin Rummy mixed with railroad building. Maybe it’s worker placement with dice. Or, as is the case with Got Five!, maybe it’s abstract logic combined with good old-fashioned deduction.

If you’ve ever played classics like Mastermind or even a game like Clue, you’ll immediately recognize the basic concept here. You’re given a set of information, in this case, hidden number tiles that everyone else can see, but you can’t. Your job is to figure out exactly what those numbers are using nothing but logic, deduction, and the information sitting right there in front of you.

Simple enough, but there is one small wrinkle in Got Five!. Everyone else is doing exactly the same thing, they have their own set of hidden tiles to figure out. The game is a race to see who gets it done first.

With a 15-minute playtime for up to 4 players, Got Five! nails that filler sweet spot, and because the rules are simple to learn and the game is colorful and bright, it’s perfect for family board game night, a no-brainer really.

The question I think I want to answer in this review is wether or not Got Five! has the chops to be a little more, a good filler for the board game geeks out there like me who are looking for an excuse to buy another shelf to put more games on.

Let’s find out!

Overview

Final Score: (4.50 out of 5) Awesome Game!

I think the most interesting thing about Got Five!, once you’ve got a few back-to-back games under your belt, is the realization that deduction and logic aren’t actually the only things going on here.

Something happens around your third or fourth game.

You realize that if you’re going to sit there and wait until you’re 100% certain about every number hidden in front of you, you’ve probably already lost.

Because the winner of Got Five! isn’t necessarily going to be the player who solves their puzzle with absolute mathematical certainty. It’s going to be the player who recognizes when they know enough, looks at the odds and pace of the game, takes a calculated risk, and goes for it.

You don’t have the luxury of sitting there like some pipe-smoking professor of mathematics, spending ten minutes constructing a flawless proof that the blue tile in front of you must be a seven. While you’re doing that, Susan across the table has made two educated guesses, solved her hand and is already looking at you like you’re an idiot.

You have to think on your feet.

You’re eliminating possibilities, making assumptions, watching what everyone else is doing and constantly deciding whether you have enough information to make your move. There’s logic here, certainly, but there’s also intuition, probability and just enough gambling to keep the whole thing from feeling like homework.

Abstract deduction games are difficult to describe because explaining their mechanics inevitably makes them sound far more academic than they actually feel at the table. Got Five! has some of that academic feel to it but in practice, Got Five! has the energy of a party game.

Turns move quickly. Everyone is paying attention. You’re racing against each other, second-guessing yourself and occasionally taking a shot before you’re entirely certain you’ve got the answer. Then somebody suddenly announces that they’ve figured out their tiles and everyone else groans because they were one bloody turn away.

That’s Got Five!.

It’s clever without being exhausting, competitive without being particularly mean and thinky without demanding that everyone at the table be a hardened strategy gamer.

And that’s perhaps its greatest strength.

I can see this working with almost anyone, from relatively casual players looking for a quick 15-minute game to heavy gaming nerds like myself who normally consider a rulebook under 30 pages suspiciously lightweight.

Got Five! is just a lot of fun to play, and so far, everywhere I have tried, it would take 3-4 rounds before anyone was willing to move on to the next game. A very strong sign that this one is a keeper.

Components

Score: 
Tilt: 

Pros: Bright, colorful, and sturdy; feels wonderful to handle, everything is perfectly tuned.

Cons: It has the look of a kids game, some might pass on it for that reason.

Components

Got Five! is a fantastic little production, especially considering that we’re talking about a 15-minute filler game here.

The tiles are chunky, colorful and feel great in the hand. The artwork is bright and clean, the numbers are immediately readable, and everything has been designed with the rather important idea that you should be able to glance across the table and instantly understand what you’re looking at.

The game also comes with erasable whiteboard pens and boards for tracking your deductions, which might sound like a small thing, but it’s a fantastic addition. They feel good to use, keep everything organized and, perhaps most importantly, help keep the game moving at the brisk pace it was clearly designed for.

Even the rulebook gets it right. It’s clear, concise and doesn’t waste your time trying to turn a simple game into a 30-page technical manual. You can crack open the box for the first time, learn the rules, teach everyone else, and have your first game finished in under half an hour without anyone sitting there wondering what the hell they’re supposed to be doing.

There isn’t anything particularly extravagant here, nor does there need to be. Got Five! simply understands exactly what kind of game it is and gives you everything you need to play it in the best possible form.

It’s pitch-perfect execution.

Theme

Score: 
Tilt: 

Pros: A party-game-like atmosphere that creates a great table presence.

Cons: The game really doesn’t have a theme unless putting funny faces on tiles is a theme.

Got Five! doesn’t really have a theme. It’s very simply an abstract deduction game, but it does have this wonderfully friendly and colorful presentation that is going to get the attention of kids scanning your game shelf. Which is great, because while I think Got Five! works with pretty much any sort of gaming group, I think it’s particularly strong with kids.

More importantly, it has that perfect balance of rules, strategy, and fun where everything feels like it has been thoroughly tested, adjusted, and stripped down until the designers arrived at the ideal version of the game.

You can almost reverse-engineer the design process just by playing it.

If Got Five! used six numbers instead of five, it would essentially be the same game, except slightly longer, and I think it would start overstaying its welcome. With four numbers, it would probably be over too quickly. If you had to identify the colors as well as the numbers, suddenly you’ve added a layer of complexity the game doesn’t need. If you only had one type of action instead of the two, sorting and category questions, the deduction would become too straightforward, and the whole thing would lose much of what makes it interesting.

Everything feels like it’s sitting exactly where it should be.

I obviously wasn’t there during development, but Got Five! feels like a game that went through a hell of a lot of testing. I can easily imagine versions with more numbers, fewer numbers, additional rules and different ways of asking questions, with each unnecessary piece slowly shaved away until only the good stuff remained.

The result is a game that might technically be themeless, but still has a very clear identity. It’s bright, friendly, fast and immediately approachable, with that easygoing party-game energy that makes you want to pull it off the shelf and say, “Alright, one more.”

And because a game takes about fifteen minutes, one more usually turns into three.

Gameplay

Score: 
Tilt: 

Pros: A perfectly tuned game that knows its design goal and achieves it with perfection.

Cons: If you don’t like deduction games, you will only like this game instead of loving it.

In Got Five! you have a single objective: be the first player to figure out what the five tiles sitting in front of you are.

The problem, of course, is that you can’t see them.

The only information you have to work with is the tiles revealed during the game and the information you can squeeze out of the other players.

Each round, a player does two things. First, they reveal a tile. Then they get to ask one of two types of questions.

You can compare the dots on a revealed tile to one of your hidden tiles. Every tile has either one, two, or three dots on it, and the other players simply tell you whether or not they match. Alternatively, you can ask the other players to place a revealed tile into the correct numerical position among the five hidden tiles sitting in front of you.

That’s basically the game.

From those tiny scraps of information, you have to figure out exactly what five tiles you have through deduction and process of elimination. At any point, even during someone else’s turn, you can shout “Got Five!” and attempt to solve your puzzle. Get all five right and you win. Get even one wrong and you’re out of the game.

To help you along, each player has a board hidden from everyone else and an erasable marker for taking notes. The board shows all the possible tiles in the game, including their colors, dots, and values. As information comes in, you start crossing off possibilities until eventually the answer begins to emerge.

The clever bit is that you’re rarely eliminating possibilities one at a time.

For example, a sorting question might suddenly tell you that the blue, red and orange tiles in front of you are all higher than 40. Bang. Every possible tile below 40 is eliminated from those positions.

Then you notice there are only four unrevealed red tiles left. You know three of them have two dots and one has a single dot. Another player reveals a blue tile, asks whether its two dots match one of their hidden red tiles, and gets a positive answer. That little piece of information might suddenly allow you to eliminate with a fair amount of certainty several more possibilities and identify your own red tile.

Now you know your red tile is 21.

But that doesn’t just tell you the red tile.

If the orange tile was previously sorted to the right of it, you now know the orange tile must be higher than 21. Suddenly another chunk of possibilities disappears from your board.

One answer leads to another deduction, which leads to another, and occasionally a seemingly insignificant piece of information causes half your board to collapse.

I know that sounds slightly confusing when I’m trying to describe it in a blog post. It’s considerably easier to understand when you’re actually sitting at the table. The important point is that information in Got Five! compounds. A single reveal or answer can eliminate a surprising number of possibilities if you’re paying attention and applying a bit of logic.

In our games, we saw players solve their entire puzzle in as few as five or six turns.

And this is where Got Five! becomes wonderfully tense.

There isn’t a timer. Nobody is counting down. Yet the entire game develops this pressure-cooker atmosphere because every time a tile is revealed or a question gets answered, you know that might be the piece of information somebody else needs.

You might be sitting there thinking, I’m almost certain I’ve got this.

Then someone else shouts “Got Five!”

Dammit!

That’s the trap. You don’t really have the luxury of waiting until you’re 100% certain. Eventually you have to decide whether the information you have is good enough and take the shot, because somebody else is probably reaching exactly the same conclusion about their own puzzle.

The rules are incredibly simple, but what emerges from them is fast, competitive, and surprisingly exciting. Got Five! creates that wonderful little dopamine hit when a pile of apparently disconnected information suddenly clicks into place, and you realize you know the answer.

And then you want to do it again.

I can pretty much guarantee that Got Five! isn’t going to be played once and put back in the box. You’re going to play it again and again.

Because once you’ve solved your five faster than everyone else, it feels amazing and if someone beats you to it, that unsatisfying, can’t let it go sensation will drive you nuts.

Replayability and Longevity

Score: 
Tilt: 

Pros: Addictive; you’re going to want to play this over and over again.

Cons: I’m sure there is a limit somewhere; I would imagine eventually you will tire of it.

I’m going to make this one short and sweet.

From the first time I put Got Five! on the table, everyone I introduced it to was immediately hooked. There was simply no such thing as playing one game, and since then it has been played over and over again in my house.

It has very quickly become one of those standard “Let’s do a quick one” games, which I think is about the highest compliment you can give a filler.

There aren’t piles of different modes, variable setups, or mountains of content here. It doesn’t need any of that. The replayability comes from the fact that the puzzle is different every time, solving it feels great and, win or lose, fifteen minutes later you’re ready to have another crack at it.

That’s really all there is to say.

Got Five! has the chops. The 15-minute playtime makes it incredibly easy to get to the table, and the game itself makes it difficult to play just once.

It really sticks the landing.

Conclusion

Conclusion

Got Five! is a fast, clever, and ridiculously fun little filler that asks almost nothing from you. Set it up, spend a few minutes explaining the rules, and everyone at the table will be dialed in and, before long, demanding another game.

It pretty much sells itself.

This is an incredibly easy recommendation for me because I’m genuinely struggling to come up with a group that wouldn’t enjoy Got Five! It’s simple enough for kids, clever enough to keep experienced gamers engaged, and short enough that even the most reluctant board gamer isn’t being asked to make some sort of blood oath committing their entire evening to it.

Hell, this is a game even my wife will play, and we’re talking about a person regularly quoted in our house as saying:

“I hate board games.”

She likes Got Five!

Frankly, if Got Five! were on trial for whether or not it belongs in everyone’s collection, that’s the only piece of evidence I’d present.

The prosecution rests.