Tag Archives: product review

Product Review: Learn About Life Christmas Trivia Puzzle

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[Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]

I don’t normally review jigsaw puzzles for the blog.

Not that I have anything against them; in fact, I quite enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles with my mom and sister. (My sister is an absolute master of jigsaws. 3D puzzles, edgeless puzzles, intentionally confusing and repetitive patterns… she’s bested them all.)

But when it comes to PuzzCulture reviews, I usually prefer jigsaw-style puzzles that offer a bit more challenge than the traditional jigsaw.

Which brings me to today’s review.

Yes, Livuzzle’s Learn About Life Christmas Trivia Puzzle is a traditional jigsaw, but it also has the answers to trivia questions lurking amidst the many colorful details of the puzzle’s imagery.

Seventy-two nuggets of (mostly) holiday-themed trivia are depicted by the items and events in the puzzle, so you have a scavenger hunt for each trivia question’s inspiration as you assemble this thousand-piece puzzle.

Although both questions and answers are provided, I do wish there was a sheet with just the questions, because it would have been fun to see how many trivia questions I could answer with only the puzzle in front of me. That being said, the scavenger hunt element added to the holiday fun as all sorts of Christmas ephemera came to life with each puzzle piece placed.

I also appreciated the variety of different jigsaw pieces. That might sound silly, but when you’ve done enough jigsaw puzzles, you get used to very similar-sized pieces and cut patterns, and it gets a little underwhelming.

Look at the variety of piece sizes and styles for just these edge pieces.

These little details and differences mean a lot.

Puzzles within puzzles…

The art style is another selling point. The mix of thin and thick outlines, all the patterning… a lot of care and attention went into the imagery.

Trevor Petersen’s art evokes classic holiday art (especially the Santa in the center of the puzzle) and gives the puzzle a timeless feel.

If you’re a jigsaw fan (or a trivia-hound like myself), this is a great addition to your shelf.

[This Christmas Trivia Puzzle is for all ages, and it’s available from Livuzzle and participating websites, starting at $24.99. It can also be found in this year’s Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide, coming soon!]

Product Review: Seas of Havoc

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[Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]

The life of a pirate isn’t all about gold and raiding and gold and avoiding the authorities and gold and gold. It’s also about building a name for yourself. And the greatest pirates, the most feared, the most successful, they aren’t just famous… they’re INFAMOUS.

And that’s the goal of every pirate sailing the, uh, one sea in Seas of Havoc: gaining the most infamy through deeds both impressive and treacherous.

Seas of Havoc is a game for 2-5 players that is part resource management and part combat tactics.

The gameplay alternates between an Island Phase (where your skiffs gather resources from the Market or the islands surrounding the sea) and a Sea Phase (where the pirates maneuver their main ship around the board to wage war and damage their opponents’ vessels and reputations).

There is no set number of rounds in Seas of Havoc. Instead, the game ends whenever the damage deck has been depleted during a Sea Phase. That phase is completed by the players, and then they total up their infamy.

I quite like the fact that player choices (and not an arbitrary number of rounds) determines the end of play. It adds agency and urgency to the proceedings.

Now, you CAN play the game by acquiring infamy through upgrading and collecting cards and trying to avoid combat, but you’d be playing with one arm tied behind your back. Cannonball attacks and ship ramming are such big components of the gameplay that you can’t really win unless you’re at least a little bit of a bastard, if not a right bastard of a scurvy seadog.

I know adversarial games aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, so it’s worth noting there is another way to play Seas of Havoc as a solo or a collaborative game, where you (or you and your fellow players) tackle the threat of the Ghost Fleet.

I did enjoy the collaborative version of the game against the Ghost Fleet — I’m an easy mark for cooperative gameplay that’s the players vs. the game — but I also absolutely had a blast seeing how ruthless I could be against a band of friends going whole hog with cannonballs. (Especially when we grabbed some LEGO cannons and actually started firing at each other like proper scalawags.)

Speaking of cannonballs, I need to highlight how much thought clearly went into all the physical components of this game. The cards are high quality, all of the materials are sturdy, and this feels like a game that will endure many playthroughs without wear and tear.

And the designs help with your immersion! The spinning wheel on the character board, the ship pieces, and especially the flattened edge on the cannonballs… all terrific, creative choices. (I am so glad the cannonballs aren’t round, what a nightmare that would’ve been.)

That level of care means a lot to me as a board game fan, and clearly it means a lot to the team at Rock Manor Games.

Factor in the different ships and captains (allowing for great replay value as you try out various combinations) and this is a game meant to challenge newcomers and experienced players alike across many sessions at the table.

Seas of Havoc delivers exactly what it promises: chaos on land and on deck as a band of avaricious pirates scheme and smash and blast their way into high-seas history.

The mix of all-out combat with carefully tracking and taking advantage of resources offers multiple levels of gameplay that keep either phase of the game from dragging on too long.

Don’t wait for Talk Like a Pirate Day. Give this one a shot soon.

[Seas of Havoc is for ages 14 and up, and it’s available from Rock Manor Games and participating websites, starting at $60. It can also be found in this year’s Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide, coming soon!]

Product Review: THINK. Conversation Cards

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[Note: I received a free copy of this product in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]

Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said that good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

And it’s hard to deny that. Whether it’s a late night chat with friends, a conversation over drinks with a colleague or a loved one, or a spirited debate at a cocktail party, engrossing discussion is good for the soul, good for the mind, and good for the ego, whether people agree with you or not.

Sometimes these conversations emerge organically, and other times, someone asks a question that prompts discussion, debate, disagreement, understanding, or some combination of all.

Well, if you’re looking to spark a conversation, THINK. Conversation Cards are an excellent place to start.

Each of the 120 high-quality cards in the THINK. deck poses a question in one of eight headline categories. It could be about faith, technology, morality, public service, or our role in society / the world at large.

For example: What should a society reward more: effort, skill, risk, or results?

And as the discussion unfolds, you can flip the card over and delve into the topic with several follow-up questions. They might ask you to go deeper into your own beliefs, or to ponder a specific scenario related to the main question, or pose a tangential hypothetical.

But each card is carefully crafted to ask difficult questions without judgment, and encourage everyone at the table to share their thoughts and consider the words and opinions of others.

(Obviously some cards will lead to more agreement than others, but most are worded in a way that at least encourages some debate, even if most people will end up agreeing.)

Some of the best social games — Superfight, Cult Following, Secret Hitler — involve passionate discussion and challenging strongly-felt opinions as part of a winning or losing strategy. THINK. bypasses the gameplay aspect entirely, focusing on discussion.

It’s obviously not appropriate for every get-together (I’ll probably leave it at home come Thanksgiving, heh), but I am looking forward to my next chance to pull out the deck and have a thoughtful exchange of ideas with friends.

[THINK. is available for $29.99 at thinkconversationcards.com. There’s no age listing, but I wouldn’t play with kids, given some of the challenging topics. It lists 2-6 players, but the more the merrier, I say.]

Product Review: Bread Basket

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[Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]

Playing games and enjoying snacks have gone hand-in-hand forever, so it’s only natural that games about making snacks would evolve over time.

Today’s game from Crab Fragment Labs, Bread Basket, is a brilliant example.

Bread Basket is a card game all about earning points by building sandwiches with the cards in your hand. When I thought about shuffling cards and making sandwiches, it brought to mind Dagwood from the Blondie comic strip or Garfield from the cartoon, ready to unhinge their jaws and take an enormous bite!

You see, building a sandwich isn’t just a skill, it’s an art. You need to balance your ingredients, flavors, tastes and textures, all while making sure you can actually take a bite of the sandwich at the end.

And it’s the same idea with Bread Basket, but with point values instead of flavors.

There are rules to your sandwich making. Your sandwich must have bread (matching cards on each side) and the ingredients in between must be lower-numbered cards than the bread. But with each player adding only one card at a time to the shared sandwich-making space on the table, you’ll need timing, strategy, and luck to make a sandwich and score points.

A sandwich consists of a string of cards where two cards match on either hand, and the cards in the middle are of lower value. If you complete the sandwich with your bread, you collect the point value of the cards contained between the pieces of bread.

For instance here, the bread are the two steak cards, and the points earned in this sandwich would be 15.

Once one player is out of cards (or the deck of available cards to draw runs out), the hand is over. You get points for all of the sandwiches you’ve made, but you LOSE points for all of the cards remaining in your hand.

This mix of strategies adds to the challenge and the fun of the game, since you’re trying to form sandwiches to earn points, but also to eliminate cards from your hand. (This mimics a dual-play mechanic from one of my all-time favorite card games, 12 Days.)

You can use high cards to start potential sandwiches, but you can also use them to block sandwiches.

Here you see a string of cards played. But the following move does NOT complete a sandwich, since a sandwich can’t contain a higher number.

The gameplay changes rapidly as each new card is added. Do you shift from trying to make a sandwich to trying to block one, or do you prioritize dropping high-value cards from your hand, so you’re not penalized later? (Or do you drop a Ten in the middle of the string, accomplishing both in one move?)

For a game with only 55 cards (5 each of the cards 1-10, plus five onion cards valued at -5 points) and only two options on your turn (play card or draw a card), there is so much strategy and replay value packed into this deck.

And since you can play with as few as two players and as many as six, the gameplay is very different depending on the group.

With six players, I found myself focusing more on emptying my hand, rather than making sandwiches, because the sandwich-making space changed so rapidly. In two-player games, there was more time to strategize the sandwich building, grabbing more points.

(We also played several house-rule versions we came up with, like using the first card as the highest possible card in a sandwich, or using Onions like Aces to capture and remove Tens and other high cards from the board.)

Like all great card games, Bread Basket is very quick to learn, but not so easy to master. After playing for two hours with family members, they’ve requested it make an encore appearance at Thanksgiving. How apropos!

Bread Basket is available in PDF form from Crab Fragment Labs for only $3 and in full printed deck form for $10.95 from DriveThruCards. (Actually, there are three decks available: the traditional deck, a pirate-themed Beard Basket deck, and a spooky Dread Basket deck.)

I’d recommend picking up a deck from DriveThruCards; the colors are warm and vibrant, the deck is made of quality card stock, and printer ink at home can be pricey.

You can check out Bread Basket and many more games at the Crab Fragment Labs website.

Product Review: Reflectron and Egyptian Triglyph

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[Note: I received a free copy of these puzzles in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]

Forgive these somewhat shorter reviews, but it’s really hard to talk about brainteasers and puzzle boxes without accidentally spoiling them for users. So you get a two-for-one review today!

The Rubik’s Cube is one of the cornerstones of brain-teaser puzzling, but the twisty puzzles inspired by that classic puzzle continue to amaze with their innovation and cleverness. We’ve seen speed cubes, ghost cubes, 3D-printed monstrosities like the Yottaminx, and even a self-solving cube!

But I don’t know that I’ve seen a twisty puzzle that so neatly and cleanly reinvents the wheel quite like Project Genius’s Reflectron.

Unlike the same-sized cubes of traditional twisty puzzles, Reflectron’s squares are different sizes, meaning that it takes on wildly different and more mind-bending shapes with just a few twists!

As you can see, every twist makes Reflectron blockier, stranger, and more alien. The shiny reflective patterning also makes it feel more like an alien artifact you’re handling than the familiar, colorful twisty cube we’ve all seen before.

Reflectron takes this simple change and brings a whole new feel to this tactile solving experience, and I find myself idly returning to this twisty puzzle again and again. It’s a genuine treat to play with!

[Reflectron is for ages 8 and up, and it’s available from Project Genius and participating websites, starting at $14.99. It can also be found in this year’s Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide!]

While Reflectron offers many paths to a solution, our second brain teaser offers only one… and it’s a doozie.

Say hello to the Egyptian Triglyph, a puzzle that combines tactile puzzle-solving with Tetris-style block pieces, absolutely warping your brain into a pretzel with its deviousness.

A cube inside a 3D triangular frame, Egyptian Triglyph challenges the solver to disassemble the cube into its component pieces and then reassemble the cube inside the frame.

And it’s difficult to describe the vast gulf in difficulty between unraveling this puzzle and putting it back together again.

I found disassembling the puzzle relatively easy, and I enjoyed maneuvering the pieces out of the surprisingly small gaps in the triangular frame.

But even if you pay close attention to the order in which you removed the pieces, you’ll find putting them back to be quite a daunting task. I would rank it as one of the most difficult puzzly experiences I’ve ever had.

You’ll need a steady hand, a keen eye, and loads of patience and skill to put the pieces all together again. But at least it’s less messy than old Humpty Dumpty.

Egyptian Triglyph proves that putting things back the way you found them is harder than it looks.

[Egyptian Triglyph is for ages 8 and up, and it’s available from Project Genius and participating websites, starting at $17.99. It can also be found in this year’s Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide!]

Product Review: Athena

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[Note: I received a free copy of this puzzle in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]

An archaeological dig site can be a very busy place. You’ve got your crew digging, folks photographing the scene and documenting artifacts, staffers keeping meticulous notes… and then there’s you, the lead archaeologist, holding part of a priceless relic: the bust of Athena.

Can you navigate a chaotic dig site and reunite the statue with its pedestal? That’s the puzzly challenge set before you in Athena.

A chain-solving brain teaser in the vein of sliding-tile puzzles or the famous Tower of Hanoi ring puzzle, Athena requires you to think like a tactician or a chess player. You must analyze the scene, move the pieces according to specific rules, and try to plot out the correct path for your lead archaeologist.

There are 50 challenge cards included, each with a particular arrangement of workers on the board and color-coded paths for the pieces to follow.

On card #1, you can see the paths available for the blue worker (who begins in the blue circle) and the lead archaeologist (who begins in the brown and gray circle). The pedestal sits in the gray circle.

The blue worker can only move between one of two spots along the blue path, and the lead archaeologist can move along the brown paths.

So you move the blue worker out of the lead archaeologist’s path, and bam, the statue is reunited with the pedestal.

This is a fairly simple setup. What could you need all these other worker pieces for?

I mean, there’s seventeen of them, plus your lead archaeologist and the pedestal for the statue. Where could they all fit?

Oh!

As you can see, the base allows for numerous places for the workers to be positioned, and trust me, those later challenge cards can get crowded very quickly.

Let’s take a look at another card as an example.

Here’s the challenge card. As you can see, the five blue workers (indicated by the five blue rings) have lots of options for movement, while the green worker and the lead archaeologist have very few.

But it seems simple enough. You only need to move the lead archaeologist two spots. How tough could that be?

Let’s finish setting the pieces and take a look.

Oh. That’s slightly more daunting.

With only one space available, you’re going to need to move all of the pieces around so that your lead archaeologist can proceed forward.

And suddenly, you’re thinking five moves ahead, looking at how one piece moving creates an opening for another piece, and then another. But wait, this piece can only move to one spot, so these pieces must go over here in this order…

Your mind adapts quickly. You begin to see ALL the possibilities unfurl in front of you. You develop patterns and ideas for how to move things as you’re placing new challenge cards down and setting the pieces in place.

Of course, the challenge cards increase in complexity and difficulty, so as soon as you start hitting your stride, you have new obstacles to overcome. And with some solutions requiring dozens of moves to complete, I can guarantee that you’ll have plenty of challenges awaiting you.

Athena is an engaging reinterpretation of classic chain-solving puzzles, adding a delightfully colorful touch to strategic puzzly thinking. Not only that, but it’s a terrific introduction to the kind of mental gameplay that chess and other puzzly pursuits require.

[Athena is for ages 8 and up, and it’s available from Project Genius and participating websites, starting at $24.99.]