Will your pairs match others in Pluckin’ Pairs?

Today while talking to a co-worker, she mentioned that when her family gets together, they love to play Apple to Apples.

When it comes to modern party games, a lot of people are familiar with Apples to Apples and enjoy playing it with family and friend. It’s a simple game of picking the best matches among a set of words.

Well, there’s a new party game about making matches for you to take a look at – Pluckin’ Pairs.

Playing Pluckin’ Pairs
Pluckin’ Pairs was published in 2012 by R&R Games that 3-8 people can play. It’s is a simple party game where players identify pairs of images and see if others come up with the same pairs.

The game is played over 5 rounds. In each round, 11 image cards are set out on the table and players simultaneously pair up the images. Players have 90 seconds and create 5 pairs among the images any way they want by recording the pairs on their score sheets. An image can only be used in one pair. So some matches may be tricky and 1 image won’t be used in a pair.

After time is up, players compare the pairs they thought of with those of the other players. If there is a match, each player that had that same pair will score points equal to the number of players with that pair. So if 3 people all matched the bottle of soda with the egg/toast/bacon (sample images to the right), then each of those players would score 3 points for that pair.

However, if every player had the same pair, then they all score 0 for that pair. Players also score 0 if no one matches their pair.

Players tally their scores for that round, flip over the cards (double-sided cards) and start the next round with the newly revealed 11 images.

The player with the most points after 5 rounds is the winner.

Can the whole family enjoy Pluckin’ Pairs?

As you can see, Pluckin’ Pairs is a very simple game. And likewise, very approachable for all members of a family that can think of matches and write them down. The game information indicates ages 12 and up. But we don’t know why it’s so high. There’s no doubt younger kids can play Pluckin’ Pairs.

And if you’ve got youngsters that can’t write yet, just team them up with another family member who can. Because kids can be very creative in their matches.

Many times, the kids will see things in the images that I may have missed.

What we like about Pluckin’ Pairs
Besides the simple nature of it, the biggest pro for the game is the creativity it brings out during play – trying to figure out what you’ll pair up and why.

The fun of the game is at the end of the rounds when players explain why they pair up the images the way they did:

“Why did you pair the UFO with the train?” “Because, they’re both methods of transportation?”

“Why did you pair the UFO with the butterfly?” “Because, they both fly.”

“Why did you pair the UFO with the briefcase?” “Because when the aliens come to town, they mean business.”

But there are a few cons too
While there can be a lot of discussion at the end of each round about the pairings, a lot of the game is played out in silence. And for a party game, that isn’t a great quality. Rather than party game, it might be best described as a group game. One that you can easily play with many players.

A noticeable con to the game also surfaced as soon as we started writing down our pairings. The score sheets provided aren’t that great. As they’re designed, each player will go through 1 sheet per round. And that means you’ll rattle through the pad of sheets pretty quickly. However, we found a way to adjust how we wrote our pairings on the sheets so we could get through many rounds on a single sheet. In the end, making notes of your pairs and score on a notepad may be just as simple.

Another minor con is that we also found an error in the rules. For such a simple game, with only 1 page of rules, we’d think it would be pretty easy to proof. In the Overview at the start of the rules it indicates that “There are five rounds.” Yet a number of paragraphs later in the Game End section it reads, “The game ends at the end of the sixth round.” A simple error that’s probably just nit-picky on our part. But it did leave us scratching our head and figuring that we can play as many rounds as we’d like anyway.

How does it score on the “Let’s Play Again” game meter?
Pluckin’ Pairs didn’t score as high on our “let’s play again” game meter for a couple reasons. The first we’ve already mentioned in that during a large part of the game everyone is fairly silent. The other is that 5 rounds seemed to take up enough time that the kids weren’t begging for more.

With that said though, if you’re looking for a nice after-dinner, light group game while sitting around the table, Pluckin’ Pairs can bring in some interesting matching choices.

Thanks R&R Games for a copy of Pluckin’ Pairs.

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