Image (board game)

Image is a card game created by Henry Szwarce and released by the 3M company in 1971, for two to six players, with a typical playing time of about thirty minutes and a recommended age of nine and up. Each player is dealt five cards from a special deck whose categories are Place, a birthplace; Activity, a field of work; Time, a time period; Status, whether the person is living or historical; and Letter, the first letter of the person's last name. Players build up to four character images at once by playing cards onto a shared board, swapping cards as needed, with the goal of assembling a combination of cards that together identify a real or fictional person. Once a player completes an image by playing the matching letter card, they announce who the character is and score points based on how many cards make up that completed image; the player with the most points at the end wins. A reviewer for Games and Puzzles called it a highly enjoyable, though not overly skillful, variation on the guessing game Botticelli.