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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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It’s no secret that I am a fan of the Take It Easy school of games, even though they lack the interaction that almost defines gaming for me. I suppose part of my enjoyment of them is the fact that, no matter what table I play them at, everyone has a good time. More than that, despite the lack of interaction, they always seem to bring out the competitive spirit in folks.
I had already been exposed to Reiner Knizia’s FITS before it became available as an iSO game. It changes the formula by having players place blokus/tetris-like piece on a ramp. You don't need to slide the pieces down but the ramp reinforces the fact that, like Connect Four or Tetris, gravity is a conceptual part of the game. You don't place pieces. You stack them. The game comes with four boards that have different placement restrictions and goals. Like Take It Easy, there is a caller who calls out what pieces players have to place on their board. However, at the start of each round, every player has to place a different piece on their board so there is no way anyone can mirror each other.
While I enjoyed FITS when I played it, there were a couple reasons I didn’t feel the need to get my own copy. For one thing, the high toy factor of the game was a double-edged sword. The plastic shapes and the plastic ramps definitely add a sense of fun and tactile play to the game. However, they also make it a big game and storage space in my closet is at a premium.
I also would have preferred that it came with more than four player sets. After all, there is an element of party game to Take It Easy-style games and the only limit to the number of players is the number of player boards since everyone goes at the same time. I’d like to have a bigger party than four people.
Finally, and this is a completely personal peccadillo, I honestly didn’t care for the fact that you used every shape in every round. In Take It Easy, you don’t use every tile in every game, adding an element of uncertainty to the game. While the stacking rules and the different boards still add a lot of variety to FITS, the fact that you still know every piece will somehow make it on the board takes some of the tension out of it for me. Now, since it can be argued that that knowledge makes the game better and less random, I admit that this might be an irrational thing to hold against FITS.
Still, when FITS became available as an iSO game and was only two dollars, I knew that I was going to get it. Isn’t it amazing how five dollars can seem unreasonable for an app and yet we would be overjoyed to get most board games for that price?
One of the things that makes our sense of price distortion even more ironic for me is that, due to the fact that the ipad does all the housekeeping for me and expedites game play, I am more likely to get more play out of an app than the hard copy version of the same game. (Of course, I also don't get all the little fun pieces and FITS is pratically defined by its fun little pieces)
Of course, the real question is: Was FITS worth those two dollars?
Well, I think so. While the game loses the toy factor that is definitely part of its appeal and you can only play two players at most (and not even that on most devices), that doesn’t change the fact that it is an enjoyable game. In fact, I discovered that I still like FITS, even after it is stripped of its plastic glory. That alone shows that Knizia knew what he was doing.
With the power to start a game with a tap of the pad, there is definitely an addictive quality to the game. After only a couple days of having it, I am amazed at how many times I have played it solitaire and I'm not much of a solitaire player. It doesn’t hurt that it comes with the official expansion, doubling the number of boards you get to play with.
I also have to admit that, while I do think that Take It Easy is a better game, it would be harder to implement a multi-player version of it since a FITS is long and narrow, making it easy to have two of them right next to each other. So, even though it is limited to two-player, the two-player part of it works. Since I at least want the option of playing a game on the ipad with my fiancée, this actually was what pushed me over the edge to buying the game.
FITS is not the best example of the multi-player solitaire game out there and this isn’t the most amazing app I’ve ever seen. (Online synchronic play would be pretty darn amazing for this game) However, it does do a good job letting me play the game and I have been playing the game. Perhaps that best praise I can give to FITS and to its iSO version.
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