Are you ready to see spots? Lots of spots. In many colours. And create boxes? Of course you are. Come and find out what’s lurking in this particular BOX.
Introduction
This is an interesting title and one that I really want to love perhaps a little more than I do, if I’m being completely honest with myself. It’s not that it’s not enjoyable, or good – it’s more that as you get closer to the end, you struggle to see the wood for the trees.
As a side-note this is a 2-3 player game and the box says 4-6 in teams. You’re not going to realistically play this in teams I don’t think – you can’t strategise effectively and I think it’s well suited to the 2-3 player label as it is.
Setup
Easy-peasy as is generally the case with Pack O Games titles… you take the 5 secret colour cards and deal one face-down to each player. This is the only colour you’re going to score in the game so you’ve got a singular focus. Hurrah!
Take an unused secret colour card and place it face-down on the table as the starting card. Deal the remaining standard cards out equally amongst the players and pick a start player.
What gameplay is in the BOX?
It’s not an intrinsically difficult game by any means. On your turn you play a single card from your hand either so that it lines up with any edge adjacent to an existing card, or play on top of an existing card as long as you don’t cover more than four dots.
Each card always has 12 dots in six colours, and always two of each colour. They’re also rotationally symmetrical so in some ways you’re worrying less about the overall orientation of the card which is good.
What you are worrying about though is scoring points, and this is where it starts to get a little harder to keep track of.
Scoring
You score points by creating squares across the growing landscape of cards. Specifically you score points for the size of the square if all four corners match the secret colour on your card from the set up. The bigger the square, the more you score – a point for each dot in the edge (including each corner), so a 2×2 square of identical colours would score two points total, but an 8×8 will score you a big eight points. You don’t have to have every dot filled in – that’s to say there can be gaps present that don’t contain cards, as long as the corners are all equally spaced, you’ve got a BOX and some tasty points. Which is good.
But it’s also kind of not so good. And this is where we get to our final thoughts…
Final thoughts
A few caveats first… Pack O Games rate this title as “challenging” which is the most complex end of their own scale. I don’t think it’s inherently a difficult game, but what becomes… less fun… is that you start to lose track of where you had a completed box or whether someone’s covered up a corner that you now can’t get back.
During the game itself that’s a little frustrating, but when it comes to scoring it becomes a lot more chaotic and you feel a little snow-blind at the end of it. There’s also a greater reliance on making sure cards are well aligned when placed because any knock will mean you’re potentially miscounting dots (and this is worse when you’re trying to count gaps on any particular edge).
The game has a 10+ age rating… which is probably OK, though I’ve played with adults where they’re silently counting out the length of an edge and pointing from afar to try and not give away which colour is theirs.
You could play to sabotage others but I suspect it’ll happen enough by accident as keeping track of your own stuff is often hard enough, let alone trying to intuit what colour someone else is going for and then upsetting their plan.
On the good side, it really is a definite step up in terms of complexity and I think it shows that the variety in these games comes from a lot of different places. Like with FLY, I think the innovation there is a good thing.
As I said at the start, I do enjoy it and I genuinely do think it’s more of a brain burning puzzle than a lot of these games I own, but it does get progressively a little like catching fog. Definitely one to try if you like something more complex but perhaps one to avoid if you’re looking for family fun.
