Sharon Khan
United Kingdom
Shefford
Bedfordshire
Games, games and more games!
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We bought FITS recently, as it was cheap and I like it, even if my husband hates it. As he doesn't like it, I thought I'd better teach the kids to play it, or it just wouldn't get played! This is a review of how the game worked with my 4 year old son and 6 year old daughter.
Fun Components  
My daughter isn't much of a gamer, but the fun components got her to play a couple of games of this, just because she wanted to play with the bits. Even when not playing the game, she loves to slide them down tetris like, just picking them at random rather than following the cards. My son loved the tactile nature of the game - the plastic shapes, slotting them in together, and sliding them down the ramp to fit in.
Simplicity of rules 
To some degree this depends on the boards used. The basic rules weren't hard to grasp, although my son did take a while to stop trying to slide them sideways and slot them in under other pieces. However, after a couple of tries my son now refuses to play board 4 of the basic set, and board 8 of the expansion - the ones where you have to cover or leave uncover pairs of symbols - he just finds the idea too complicated. Not a problem though, we either play just rounds 1-3, or we put in expansion boards to make 4 rounds without using boards 4 or 8.
Randomness
Although there is some randomness in the way the tiles come out, there's not much of it and skill dominates, and so an adult playing properly will almost always beat a child (in fact I pretty much always beat other adults too!) - in particular my son usually makes one really bad tile placement each round that can lose him a ton of points (where I can I do point this out and try to encouarge him to place elsewhere, but if I'm playing with other adults his board isn't always visible, so I do sometimes have to let hiim get on with it). However, you do play a few rounds, and my son is generally happy if he can come close to my score in one of the rounds, or just not end up negative in a round! For him it's more about the game than the score - the multiplayer solitaire nature of the game really helps here!
Did the child enjoy it?
It hasn't hit the heights of real favourite, being requested first every time we play games, but we have played it pretty much every day since I introduced it to him, so I think he enjoys it! And any game that gets my daughter playing, even if only a couple of times, is good in my book, as she's quite resistant to the idea of playing games right now.
And how is it from the adult's point of view?
I bought this knowing I wouldn't get to play it much with my husband, as he's not a fan, so it's great to be able to play it with my children, as it's one of those light games I love. Also, as it's multiplayer solitaire, it works just as well with children with adults as in many ways, although there's less challenge in actually winning the game!
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Rick
United States
Burnsville
Minnesota
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Thanks for the review. I have similar feelings towards this game as I play it with my 3 and 5 year old. They don't quite grasp the scoring - and think it's funny when they get huge negative scores - but they enjoy it and we can all play it together and have fun.
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