Guess the Video Game
Cover art behind a grid of 48 tiles, of which two are open. The logo is normally the last thing to appear, which means the art has to do the work — and cover art is a more legible historical document than it gets credit for.
62 games spanning 1978 to 2023, from Space Invaders to Baldur's Gate 3. The deck is heavy on the canonical ones, because a tile game only works when the picture underneath is something you have seen before.
Name the game from a few windows of its box art.
Play Guess the Video GameDate the cover before you name it
Early 1980s covers are illustration, usually airbrushed, usually against black, with the title set in a chunky geometric typeface — the art frequently depicts something the game could not render. Mid-1990s covers move to rendered 3D against a gradient, which has aged worse than anything else in the medium. Late 2000s onwards is a photographic composite, desaturated, with the protagonist facing the camera in the lower third.
Platform trade dress is worth learning because it occupies the frame edges, which is where a lot of the tiles land. A coloured band across the top of the box, a rating badge in a bottom corner, a publisher logo in the other one. Two tiles on a flat white ground with a small coloured strip is a different game from two tiles of dark painted sky.
Art direction identifies studios faster than characters do. Bright saturated primaries with clean outlines are Nintendo. Almost monochrome browns and greys with a single light source are FromSoftware. A hand-painted watercolour look is Japanese role-playing. A rubber-hose cartoon in black and white is exactly one game in this deck.
How the tiles behave
2 tiles, then 6, 13, 24 and 36 out of 48. The unopened area stays blurred rather than solid, so composition and colour mass are visible from the start — that blur is doing more for you than it looks, because the arrangement of light and dark on a cover is often enough by itself.
The frame shapes itself to whatever the round actually loaded. Of the 62 titles, 51 are portrait, four are square and seven are landscape, running from a 0.60:1 box to League of Legends at 2.6:1 and Pokemon Red and Blue as a 3:1 wordmark. A fixed cover frame threw away three quarters of those last two, and the tiles then opened onto blank letterbox bars instead of onto artwork.
Where the covers come from
The lead image on a Wikipedia game article is almost always the cover, and almost always a non-free file kept deliberately small — a few hundred pixels wide. That resolution is exactly why this deck is played through tiles instead of a zoom: magnifying a 300px cover thirteen times is unreadable mush, whereas tiles work at any resolution and read as a game rather than as an effect.
Franchise articles carry no cover art, so games that redirect to a series page — Minecraft, Fortnite, Undertale, Fall Guys — are absent rather than shipped as a round with no picture.
Scoring
Ten rounds, five rungs: 1000, 620, 380, 240, 150. Thirteen tiles is the rung where most rounds are actually decided, and it costs 620 points to get there. Because a wrong guess costs a rung, the cheap move is to open the next rung rather than gamble on a series where you are unsure which entry you are looking at.