#43: Turbulento

Turbulento

• designer: Heinz Meister
• publisher: Selecta
• date: 2006
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.71
• age: 4+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $12.50 (TimeWellSpent - btw, this is a really good deal & they only have one)

I was a little disappointed when I opened the box - there's just a bunch of wooden rounded discs, some wooden marbles & a deck of cards in a box that's double the size needed to contain all that stuff... and no board! Honestly, I thought I was getting ripped off. Then I read the rules and realized that the box was the board - and that there was a very interesting game tucked in the box with all the rest of this stuff.

It's a game of animal hide-and-seek... on your turn you flip over a card and either:

• help the animal "hide" by hitting his rounded disc with a marble & flipping him over OR
• find the hidden animal by turning over the right disc (if you're wrong, btw, the next player gets to try)

So, there's some dexterity involved (it takes practice to get the hang of flipping the discs) and some memory involved (which gets particularly tricky if you play multiple game one right after another). The reward for correctly performing a task is:

• if you help an animal hide, you get your marble back
• if you find an animal who's hiding, you get a marble from the supply

There's one disc (the Jinx) that starts the game flipped over & costs you a marble if you turn him over... though we haven't seen that come into play much in our games.

The game ends when one player runs out of marbles - and the player with the most marbles wins.

This is one of those games where the old "how do you get to Carnegie Hall?" joke comes into play - you need to practice flipping discs to get to the second (memory) part of the game - your first games will be over (for the most part) before the memory element comes into play.

The age suggestion is pretty accurate, though my 3 year old has finally figured out how to make the discs flip. When playing with 2-3 players, we give everyone more marbles so the game will go on a bit longer. (And even with that, it's a 15 minute game.)