ThinkFun Last Letter Card Game

This is my second time buying this brilliant little game. I bought for my 7 year old twins last year, and --this year-- I bought it for their cousins who enjoyed playing it so much that they wanted to know where to buy it so they could get their own copy. The premise of the game is simple. Dealer deals 5 cards for each player, then places the deck in the middle of the table with a picture facing up. Then the dealer calls out a word from that picture. The players have to spell the word (mentally or out loud), figure out its last letter and then find a word on one of their cards that begins with the last letter of the last word called. It seems easy --and sometimes it is (until someone say "cloudy" and you're tasked with finding a yarn, a yam, a yolk or a Yugoslavian in one of your pictures. Yes: yellow would be easy enough to find, but --sometimes-- we establish a rule against color names. Sometimes, we make it a "verbs only" (or "nouns only" etc) game. The player who gets rid of their cards first wins. Sometimes, the game's over in a few minutes; other times it takes half an hour. I've used this game with my kids for foreign language practice as well. I've used it to play a game of story telling where the players choose a random card out of the deck and have to make up a story about it. I've used it to "reset" the mood during a sleepover that was going through a social rough patch (it worked) and my twins have spontaneously called for a round of Last Letter to settle an argument between the two of them that may have otherwise ended on a less enlightened "how come YOU get to decide where we're going?" whiny note (made me proud!). I'm sure others have played similar games with this random deck of cards --which speaks both to the potential of open-ended play as well as to the ability a of good toy to get a hold of people's imaginations and make fun happen. The cards themselves are hilarious: detailed, colorful and delightfully bizarre. They have a certain heft when picked up as a deck and they are printed on thick card stock that both invites and survives play. I'm difficult to please when choosing games and toys (mostly because I think the toy should inspire play as opposed to the toy being the play) but I recommend this game with no reservations. In the perfect world, there is one copy in every elementary school classroom, too. One last note: I could not have predicted that this would turn out to be my son's favorite game. I suspected my daughter would like it, but her vocabulary is more expansive than my son's. He would rather do spatial puzzles, math, mazes or Legos than play Scrabble or retell a story, yet he chooses to play this game when we have 15 odd minutes and looking for something to do. He came in second in his room's spelling bee and I think this game helped him tremendously since he's neither a naturally strong speller nor the student who put an a lot of effort into studying for the bee.

I enjoy playing this game and my game-loving 5, 8, and 11 year olds all like it pretty well. This isn't a game they will want to play all day but everyone has fun when we play a few rounds. It is helpful to add different rules for players of different ages to level the playing field. My 8-year-old asked for this game because she played it at school; it's definitely a good way to encourage quick & creative thinking and vocabulary practice.

My son asked for this card game. And now the whole family likes to play!

Purchased this as a gift for a family with 10-12-14 year old kids. The game was quite simple to learn and game play is very quick, about 15 minutes a round. We laughed a lot as players got caught using the first letter of the previous word. We also added some additional rules; for example, if a plural word was announced, we made it singular (otherwise the game is spent looking for words which start with the letter s.) We also banned the word eye, as every card has eyes, and a really fast player could go out in a matter of seconds with nothing more creative than a three letter word. The 10 year old commented that this would be a good game for kids to help them learn how to spell and learn new words. The pictures are wonderfully detailed and offer many word options, but our last letters seemed to often repeat-most common were R, E, S, W, N, which makes it easy to fall into a pattern of using the same words. It seemed that we were missing out on some of the fun of the game, so we talked about other variations, such no consecutive identical words or no repeat words during the hand, or only words that had at least a certain number of letters. We are big fans of Spot It, and the similarities to that game were noted by each person who joined the game. Lots of fun, lots of potential for creativity, easy to adapt to different learning levels.

SLPs - THIS IS AN EXCELLENT GAME FOR CONVERSATIONAL SPEECH FOR YOUR OLDER ELEMENTARY AND JUNIOR HIGH KIDS! I loved it so much, I bought a second set as a gift for another Speech Teacher. Students love this game and we never tire of looking at the odd/interesting/detailed pictures. We always find something we've never seen before. If you are considering this for your children, it would make a very interesting family game.

Really fun little game. My husband and I make up rules for ourselves (like, the adults' words have to be a particular part of speech, or part of a 3-word phrase) so that our daughters (age 7) can be competitive with us. The illustrations on the cards are rich with detail and are really funny, and there are enough cards that even having played maybe 10 times, we all felt like we had at least one new card in our hands each game.

I am a Dyslexia reading specialist in the public schools, and use a multi-literacy approach to help students learn to read and spell. On the school days before a big event, like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, summer break, or when celebrating a big achievement (like completing all the sub steps in a book), I put aside my lessons and play phonemic awareness games with my students. They love this card game. This is not a spelling game, knowing the correct letter, but identifying the first or last sound of a word. All of my students can do this, which makes the game a blast.

Very fun game and deceptively, a bit more challenging than you think it's going to be. Recommended for something a bit different.

My kids love this game! It is an easy game to play and people of all ages can play it.

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Es un juego divertido que requiere de la imaginación de los participantes, las cartas son muy coloridas y de buena calidad, es mas divertido con 3 o mas participantes.

Our family loves this game! Our only complaint is that the cards are too huge for small hands.

Kids and I had fun with this game. Everyone has a fair chance.