Growing up I always looked forward to visiting my uncle’s house because I knew it ment I would get to do lots of fun things with my Uncle Wes. One of our favorite activities we did together was playing board games and card games. A card game that we frequently played was “Spot it!”. In this game there is a stack of cards that have different symbols on them. To play the game, players flip two cards face-up and try to be the first one to identify the matching symbol on the card and yell the name of the symbol. The catch is that there is only one matching symbol per pair of cards in the deck. Uncle Wes and I would often discuss how impressive it was that the creators of the game were able to make 55 cards where there was only one match between two cards. We would muse about how these cards could have been created. This page dives into the math behind how these cards were created.