2015/05/22

FITS (Fill in the Spaces) is just like playing Tetris, but with 2-4 players. Now, although it’s multiplayer, it’s not like Tetris variations such as Tetris Friends where you battle with a friend online and send lines to your opponent by clearing combos of lines. It’s not as fast-paced as the original Tetris either, but you’ll be spending time trying to figure out the best way to place your blocks! 

Each player has their own board and set of 16 pieces of unique polyominoes made of three to five squares. Based on randomly drawn cards, each player plays a different starting piece to add more variety to the game. And then all players play the same subsequent pieces each turn, but how you play it is entirely up to you! You can rotate or flip your pieces, but you can’t slide them horizontally to fill in a gap once they’re dropped. You can set a piece aside as well if you don’t want to place it, but you won’t be able to play that piece for the rest of the round.  

Aside from the pure enjoyment of fitting pieces together perfectly and building rows of blocks, the main objective in FITS is to score the most points and be the winner among your friends! Though you’ll quickly find that it’s not easy at all to fit all your blocks together in a way that will give you more points, especially when the piece you want never comes at the right time! Each of the four rounds, however, has a slightly different scoring system, which means that you have to adapt your strategy to each round’s rules to maximize points.  

The first round is probably closest to a traditional Tetris game, where you get a point for each row completed and are punished when you leave gaps (minus one point for each empty square). But the second and third rounds start messing with your mind – you no longer get points for completing rows. Instead, you should leave gaps open for where the board indicates a positive number of points to earn them. And of course, there are spots that would lead to points deduction if you don’t cover them up!  

The fourth round doesn’t have numbers on the board anymore. There are pairs of symbols where if you leave both of them visible at the end of the game, you get 3 points; but if you’re only able to leave one of them visible, you get -3 points. Decisions, decisions! Do you try to go for this pair of diamonds, or do you cover it now and hope that you can cover it later without messing up your other plans?  

Despite having to adjust your strategy based on each round’s rules, FITS is a very simple game that allows constant meaningful choice-making and brings back memories of playing Tetris!