THE BACKSTORY:

I have a wife who is not much of a gamer. Not an unusual story, but the twist is this: she is very, very good at pattern-recognition games (such as Set, Toppo, Blink, and Quarto), and will play these games with anyone, or even by herself at times. Another game from her childhood she liked was, oddly enough, Connect Four.

THE RECENT PAST:

I was shopping for a present for my boss and his wife (pretty much non-gamers) to play with their two daughters. I was looking at the website of Out Of The Box Games, and saw a bunch of new games that all looked well-produced. I ended up getting Snorta for the boss, and it was appropriately silly and fun, and was received well. But as I was getting ready to shut off the computer, I saw a new game that just had the look of something interesting: CoverUp. She looked, and saw it was (yet) another four-in-a-row game, with a twist. She said that it looked interesting.

“WAIT A MINUTE, ISN'T THIS SUPPOSED TO BE A REVIEW OF MIXUP?”

Yeah, yeah, I know. Well. anyway, she thought CoverUp looked kind of cool, and I clicked over to the page for her sister game, MixUp, which also looked pretty cool to me. I showed my wife, and she made a bit of a grunting noise. Not really interested.

I looked at the game a bit more and realized that it sounded like a cross between Connect Four (the vertical tic-tac-toe style game) and Set (a card game of pattern recognition). Hmmmm, this sounded like it had some promise...except that she had already grunted at it. Still, I have this unfortunate habit of "knowing better" when it comes to game selection, so I decided on a mini-campaign. One night when she came to game night with General D and his wife and me, I pointed MixUp out to her. Nothing. No response.

And yet, I knew better, so I got it and stuck it in my secret hiding place for upcoming gift-giving occasions. And when Valentine’s Day came around, it got neatly slipped into the stack of items for my wife and me to open up after getting home from our Valentine‘s Day dinner out.

She unwrapped the present with high hopes, as the previous gifts had been pretty much on the mark, and when she saw it, she said, "Oh," with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. She's always a good sport, but I thought I heard the upcoming sound of the game going into a box in the closet and never coming out again. I wondered if maybe I didn't know best after all.

The stack of presents sat on the floor in the living room for the next week or so, and then one weekend afternoon, she opened the box and looked at the components--which are really very well made--and said, “So what was the idea behind this one?” It isn’t that she couldn’t read it for herself, but she likes for me to give her the gist of what a game is about before she commits to the idea of playing it.

So I tell her that it’s a four-in-a row game.

“Like Connect Four?” she asked.

“Yes,” I tell her. “But one player has to get four of the same color in a row, and the other player has to get four of the same shape. There are three colors--red, blue and green; and three shapes--crescent, lightning bolt and raindrop.”

“So it’s sort of like Set, too, then,” she said.

And that’s when I knew I had her. We pulled out the heavy plastic pieces and board and began to play. It took a few more seconds to tell her that you could also win by getting four of a kind in a two-by-two square as well. And then we were off.
We played six games straight. I think I may have won one, maybe two, but no more. Like I said, she’s good.

SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ME?

Tell me, are you visually-minded?

When you were a kid at the dentist’s office, could you “pick the thing that doesn’t belong” in the current issue of Highlights for Children?

Do you wish tic-tac-toe were not so trivial?

Do you like a nicely-made game with heavy, nice-to-hold tiles?

Do you like playing games that make you concentrate so hard it borders on an incipient headache?


If so, you might like this game.


Can you look and look and look at a game of Set but just can’t see a group of three all-not-of-a-kind?

Do you lose at tic-tac-toe with an opponent under the age of ten, when you’re really trying your best?

Do you refuse to play a game unless there’s some kind of theme?

Do you want a game that takes an hour or more to play?


If so, you probably won’t like this game much, if at all. In fact, it make make you mad and frustrated.


SO WHAT’S THE CONCLUSION?

Pretty good game. Really, really well-made. Fast. Fun. Hard-thinking. Not trivial. The name really has nothing to do with the game. MixUp? How about TileUp?

When you win, you'll feel like you deserve it. When you lose, you’ll usually slap your forehead and say either, “Aw, man, I didn’t even see that one coming,” or “I saw it coming and couldn’t do a darned thing about it.”

And then you’ll want to play it again.