Kanoodle Fusion is a technicolour brain-tingler, scratching all the visual itches in just the right spots. A bright puzzling game that leaves you wanting more.
How to Play
Kanoodle Fusion has 50 fun puzzles to play through. In each of these puzzles, you attempt to match the colours on the physical 4×4 grid with those in the instruction booklet using only the pieces that it suggests. Seems simple, but it’s not so. The grid lights up white, and the pieces are translucent in varying colours and orientations. Sometimes you need to overlap these pieces to create the colours that the puzzle requires. Only allowed to use red and yellow pieces, but you need an orange? You’ll have to stack them! This also gets trickier as pieces can only be stacked two high, so you’ll have to plan your placements carefully to make sure everything stacks neatly.
It’s a Blue-tiful Game…
I really like the premise to Kanoodle Fusion, the colour mixing with light is quite a unique idea and makes the puzzles very sensorily appealing. The physical stacking of the pieces to create new colours is also a really engaging way of introducing this sort of topic to kids and is just as enjoyable for adults who already understand the concept. The puzzles get progressively harder throughout the booklet, both in terms of complexity of colour placement, as well as how precise you need to be in your stacking order to make sure everything fits.
On a completely minor note, I also love the name “Fusion”, it really embodies both the colour mixing aspect of the game as well as the way it uses light, suggesting that the colours are “fused” together. It makes for a really exciting sounding product.
But I’m Feeling a bit Green
Whilst 50 puzzles seems like a lot, it really isn’t once you get going. A lot of the early puzzles are very simple, and so it takes a while to get to any of the properly enjoyable tricky ones. However, by then, you’ve reached the end of the book, just when the puzzles were starting to get genuinely meaty. The other Kanoodle products in the range advertised at the back of the booklet often have more puzzles, some as many as 6x more puzzles, so it is difficult to see why so few were created for this edition. There could have been many more combos to choose from. Tertiary colours weren’t even touched upon, yet could have created some really interesting patterns. I’d happily play this game for days, but I barely got a couple of hours out of it before I’d finished it. With so few puzzles, it would have been nice to have some guidance on creatively designing your own puzzles, if they weren’t going to provide more.
There was clearly a lot of care that went into the idea of this game. However, the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired. Possibly I’m being a bit nit-picky but for a product where the two major aspects are the colour mixing and the stacking, neither of these work as well as I would like to see.
The colours that are mixed using the primary coloured pieces are clearly visually distinct from the equivalent colour in the secondary colour only pieces, but are treated as the same in the instructions booklet. I’m no physics expert, but it feels like this shouldn’t have been that hard to rectify, as surely the pigment of the secondary only pieces could be tweaked to match the mixed ones more closely? From a conceptual perspective, yes the mixed orange and the singular orange are both orange, but when you look at them next to one another, they are clearly different shades. It makes the game somewhat off-putting when you have a visual based matching puzzle that you actually have to match conceptually. I wouldn’t mind it so much if there had been later puzzles which used these different shades as part of the puzzle, but as they are consistently supposed to be the same, it is quite annoying.
This execution issue is also evident in that the pieces don’t always fit smoothly into their gaps unless you get the angle just right. Again, this would be less of a problem with more puzzles, as you’d get the hang of it over time, but equally the spaces could have been wider in production. These two production issues, whilst not necessarily a hindrance to play, does put a dampener on what would otherwise be a fantastic puzzle game.
A Mixed Reaction
Overall, Kanoodle Fusion is a really fun puzzle game to pass the time. The idea of mixing colours of light is really unique and visually exciting. However, I would have liked to have seen more puzzles provided or a guide to creating your own, and a little more care taken in the execution of the two main features of the game: colour matching and stacking.
About the author:
I’m always looking for an excuse to buy more board games and writing for a board games retailer sounds like a good one to me! I am an especially big fan of games with solo-player modes as I can cosy up of an evening with a nice warm drink, an episode of Doctor Who and a friendly match with myself. When I’m not playing board games, or writing about them, you can find me curled up with a good book or trying to wrangle my chaotic DnD group into a session.
