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Haim Shafir's Halli Galli is nearly as old as SET, then in the two-decade-old category you have Jungle Speed from Thomas Vuarchex and Pierrick Yakovenko. The ten-year-old Spot it! seems even more ubiquitous than those games, but I think it's simply a matter of having been marketed and rebranded more effectively. You can spot anything, after all, so why not make dozens of versions of the game to place in a huge number of stores?
So what's the game? Flip two cards, then grab the right dastard or dastards to claim one or both of those cards; claim the most cards to win. Why dastards? I'd presume it's the Cards Against Humanity effect, with players being given a license to say something that feels naughty, even though "dastard" is not related to the word "bastard", the latter of which arrived on the scene a couple of hundred years prior to the former and along unrelated linguistic paths. After all, the things you're grabbing aren't cowardly or underhanded in any sense. They're just sharp blobs of plastic that will hurt you when you slam your hand on them — which is pretty much the point of the game, of course.
In this game, you win and you lose at the same time, especially when someone slams their hand on top of yours. You scored a point, yay! Now you're suffering as a result, yay for everyone else! You'll play Spiky Dastards for the same reason that my neighborhood friends and I played "Knuckles" in our youth. For those unfamiliar with that game, I'll summarize how it worked in our area: Gameplay in "Knuckles" was the same as in Crazy Eights, except that the person who went out first in the round got to strike the knuckles of the player who still had cards in hand after the penultimate player went out, with the number of cards in hand equalling the number of strikes, with you using the deck of cards to strike them. The loser would cut the deck and if they revealed a black card ("coldsies"), you couldn't move your elbow when striking them — only your wrist. If they revealed red ("hotsies"), you could raise your arm while striking them, but you couldn't raise the deck over your shoulder; if you did — and everyone else watched you carefully because they were dying to see it happen — then the loser could retaliate with windmill-style, over-the-shoulder "red hotsies".
Why would you play "Knuckles"? Because you're young and you have time to kill and you find enjoyment in watching others suffer. You know you're not going to suffer too much if you lose, but ideally you won't lose — that's how all gamblers think, yes? — then you'll get to watch someone else squirm, possibly being the one to deliver the punishment.
Spiky Dastards fulfills this same desire for fun at the expense of watching others suffer — and "expense" isn't even the right word really since everyone playing is entering a pact in which you know you might be the victim. Jungle Speed features a similar degree of suffering since you often jam someone else's fingers or scratch them with your fingernails while grabbing for the totem. With Spiky Dastards, you can greatly increase your ability to do damage to someone else, so if you're looking for some screams around the Christmas tree this holiday season, you should bypass the quiet internal misery caused by thinky Eurogames and embrace these plastic spikes — or just go for a walk in the woods and dare people to make fists around pine cones. The effect will be about the same...
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