Games that feature technology do really depend on that technology not changing in any way. We found ourselves stuck with this risk in Spot the Intro. Spot the Intro is a very fun idea; it’s a music-based board game where individuals or teams need to guess a song based on the introduction of the song.
Spot the Intro‘s music selection is done through the use of your cell phones! You can each individually use your phones, so that everyone gets a chance to guess, however as the QR codes on these cards to trigger the music weren’t working the way they were intended to do, we ended up having one QR-code phone user.
Spot the Intro works in a way that one team or person looks at where they are on the board. The record player board has a bunch of different spots, and these spots declare what song era you will be guessing from. Each of the tiles have a minimum of two choices (often with the two choices on the same card, one on each side), giving you a bit of a better chance in guessing correctly. There are cards from the 1960s to the 2010s, so it’s got a fantastic variety for all ages.
When you have picked what era you’d like, the person with a phone scans the QR code. This brings up a display that has Amazon Music, Spotify and Youtube links. We found that the Spotify link didn’t open the Spotify App and instead opened up the browser. To make matters worse, you needed to log into the browser every time this was tapped. The Amazon Music link was similar. We also often found that the Youtube Music link led to videos that were removed — so overall this was a really challenging aspect of the game.
From here, you only could play 15 seconds of the song (as per the game’s instructions), but this didn’t really take into consideration that radio stations currently do skip a lot of the longer intros, so often we found ourselves really not knowing the songs with very long intros! When it comes to scoring, you can guess the name of the song and the artist for a point each. If you get either of these correct, you can then hear and guess a trivia question for an additional point.
I do like the variety of the songs, the amount of cards, and the trivia questions in Spot the Intro – I just found it extremely frustrating that none of the QR codes really worked in a smooth, streamlined way.
As someone who does enjoy music, Spot the Intro is a lovely idea, however the cards do need to be constantly looked at and updated, which is a real risk when it comes to using technology like this to create such a large card game.
You can purchase Spot the Intro on Amazon.
