Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
“It was alright,” my 10-year-old said after waxing the floor with me after our first play of the new card game Slide, designed by Claude Clement and published by Gigamic.
“Would you play it again?” I asked.
“Nah…I mean, I liked it, but I won. It was weird because I didn’t do any planning and I still won.”
I thought about this for a moment. Slide features a simple premise. From a deck of 100 cards embedded with 10 of each number, 1-10, players draw face-down cards until they have built a 4×4 tableau in their play area to set up the game. On a turn, each player simultaneously selects one of their face-down cards and places it face up in a shared area between the players. The first player chooses one of these cards, then slots it in their grid by pushing cards in a row or a column from the edge to accommodate the new card.
At the end of the game, players eliminate orthogonally-adjacent cards showing the same number, in the hopes of wiping out blocks of card sets. The player with the lowest score wins, so finding ways to knock out blocks of 8s or 9s is vital. (Of course, you could just find a way to draft low numbers on each turn, but in my experience, it’s hard to come up with a way to consistently draw 3s or lower on every pick.)
My 10-year-old nailed my feelings on the game, which was strange because I had already played the game once with the Gigamic team at SPIEL 2024. The game is so fast that we did a complete two-player game during that meeting, and as far as I could tell, my opponent was just flipping cards and adding them to her grid without thinking too much about the later consequences of card placement.
During my play with my kid, I went the other way—what would happen if I tried to strategically draft and place cards in a way that would allow me to cancel cards out of my grid by the end of the game? That was easy—my final score was double the score of my child’s tally.
With that in mind, does it really matter where I put the cards?
It Does, But You Won’t Bother Dwelling On It
Slide scales up nicely—it can accommodate 2-6 players, and the game only takes about 10 minutes to play in person. Slide is also available on Board Game Arena (BGA) where you can always find opponents ready to go. The digital implementation is my preferred playspace because it does the final math instantly and players online move fast. (For this review, I played Slide twice in person and once on BGA.)
The game looks like there’s a chance to strategically puzzle a final tableau into forcing high cards to cancel each other out. And in a couple of my plays, that’s what happened late in the game, as I tried to get a block of sevens or a pair of 10s out of my grid at the end of play. But the majority of the time, the same two things happened:
- When cards were revealed and placed in the middle of the table, everyone drafted the lowest card.
- When I was stuck with a high card, I just threw it into my grid, with a shrug of the shoulders that said, “I’ll figure out how to slide the other cards around to maybe cancel that one out later.”
That made turns for both me and other players quick, and sometimes that worked out. At no point did I feel like I did something particularly crafty to kill off a block of points. If anything, I felt like I got lucky more often than not, by ending up with a couple numbers next to each other to save myself points. It was always categorically better to have 1s, 2s, and 3s in my grid…if you can keep all the numbers in the tableau low, then worst case, your score might end up on the high teens or low 20s and that would give me a chance to win.
During my online play, a comical series of things happened—I was forced to draft a nine and two 10s during my final three turns, with nowhere to place them in a format to have them cancel out. My final score? 29 points. I had done a great job of planning for the first 13 turns, all my other cards cancelled out, and I was cosmically unlucky in drafting those 29 points I would eventually score to come in second in a three-player game.
Slide doesn’t aim high, which I can both appreciate and lament as a game that I would try to seek out for future plays. There are so many better games of chance we have in the house that play in 10 minutes or fewer with a similar player count. Gosh, even Tenzi might come out before Slide with my family, but UNO (really, any of the flavors in the ever-growing UNO family), Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, Yahtzee, or a plethora of other games make the cut before Slide would.
But as an online diversion, Slide is a nice game to have around. There’s just enough here to force a few interesting decisions and the average time to play a two-player game of Slide on BGA is seven minutes, according to the app. I can always find seven minutes to wake myself up between spreadsheets at work, right?
That’s where Slide will ultimately live. It’s hard to imagine the physical copy coming out again.
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