I’d always suspected the floor of our van had carpet.  And I was right.  Buried beneath Sunday school papers folded into fans, lost library books, colored pencils, snack wrappers, four pairs of flip flops, one skirt, three sweatshirts, eighty-four cents in change, and six inches of crumbs, there it was.  The floor.

But way in the back.  Back where the groceries get carried home, back where the car chains and the jumper cables chill, I found the game I’d bought six weeks ago.  Still in the bag, in the box, in the plastic.

And what a find.

It’s called Spot It!

Have you played?

We hadn’t.  And now we can’t stop.

It looks like this.  A little tin.  Not big enough for three Christmas cookies.  But big enough for 55 cards plus a few with instructions.

Here’s the gist.  Every card has eight pictures on it.  And EVERY card has a picture on it that matches EVERY card.

Yikes.  Even I’m confused, so let me show you instead.

Here’s how the game is set up.  Each person playing is dealt a card.  The rest of the cards are stacked face up in the middle.  The objective is to be the first person to find the match between your card and the center card.

Can you see each match?

Now what happens is that what appears to be a simple preschool game–finding the match–becomes like searching for a penny you dropped in your un-mown backyard, at night, with a flashlight.

I’m holding the card from the middle over by the card from the left.  Do you see the match now?

Barely?  Maybe?

It’s the yellow word “Stop.”

Now I’m holding the center card over near the card on the right.  See it?  It’s faint.

It’s the light blue pencil.

The person who can identify the matching item between his card and the one in the center first, gets the center card and places it on top of his pile.

We gave my son credit for the last match and put the center card on top of his pile.  He liked that.

Do you see the next match(es)?  Might have to squint.  My daughter is pointing to hers–the purple spider web.

My son’s is the blue dolphin–nearly microscopic on the center card.  I don’t think he sees it yet.

So why is this fun?

It just is.

Part of it is like the real life experience of staring at the very thing you’re looking for and never seeing it.  That’s fun, right?!

Here they are–two kids staring holes into the carpet until one sees his match.

And when that gets old, why we can deal out the cards to each other and place one up in the center.  Just the opposite of what we were doing.  Our new objective is trying to get rid of our pile of cards first by doing what we were doing before–finding the match on our top card with the card in the center.

Here my daughter called out “car” and then placed her card on top in the center.

Simple.

And sometimes easy.

But the coolest thing:  it’s a game for everyone.  Kids.  Parents.  Dads home for lunch.

Spot It!