Waldo is known for being a man of mystery, hiding in plain sight with his iconic red and white striped shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. In the newest edition of Find It Where’s Waldo, by Identity Games, he finds himself trapped inside a tube, waiting to be spotted in a sea of red, white, and blue pellets.
The game comes in the form of a see-through plastic cylinder filled with 40 teeny tiny Waldo-themed items—such as Waldo’s hat, his dog Woof, a magnifying glass, and Wizard Whitebeard—hidden inside the enclosure along with hundreds of teeny tiny pellets. The tube does not open so the player will spin, twist, and shake the cylinder with the purpose of shifting around the colored pellets so that he or she can identify each of the 40 items on the list. New items will reveal themselves as they are shaken around the packaging in different ways.
The best part about this game of observation is that there are so many different ways to play it. Try it solo, or turn it into a multiplayer game by racing the clock to see how long it takes each player to find all 40 items, or set a timer and see how many items each player can find in any set amount of time. Each item is worth a different amount of points so players can also count up the points to see who wins if they don’t have the patience to find all 40 items.
For players that want something more than just checking items off a list, the miniature deck of cards offers more imaginative clues on what to look for within the tube of hidden treasures, when played on “side one.” Those clues are more interactive, such as “Find an item that can look you in the eye” or “Find two red items at the same time,” requiring the player to manipulate the tube in certain ways to fulfill the instructions. The cards can also be interpreted in different ways for different players—such as “Find an item that you’d see at home.”
Players will take turns searching for an item that fits the description on the card, and the next player will continue by flipping over another card and finding the next hidden item that matches the new description. The game will continue until all the cards have been flipped—the player with the most completed cards wins.
The other side of the cards offer yet another way to play—lay all 27 cards out with “side two” facing up. Each card is labeled with a characteristic that may or may not match an object found inside the tube, such as “Something furry,” “Something that makes noise,” or “Something alive.” The first player has ten seconds to find an item that matches up to three of the descriptions. The player then picks up any of the cards that match the object they’ve found. As each player takes a turn, there are less and less characteristic cards on the table, making it more challenging to find an object that will match the remaining descriptions. Once all the cards are gone, the player who collected the most cards wins.
Waldo may be a sneaky little bugger but he won’t be able to escape this time when kids have his entire world packaged up neatly at their fingertips. Let the search party commence!
