My partner and I are fairly casual gamers, she likes Boggle, Monopoly and Cranium, but for the last year or so I have managed to get her to try a few different games such as Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride Marklin, Thurn and Taxis and Hive. She is slowly becoming more and more open to trying new games as she has quite enjoyed what I have shown her so far.

As I mentioned, she is a Boggle fan, but what she gets out of boggle is more of a satisfaction from seeing patterns and paths through the letters to form them into groups, than from any love of the English language. Myself, I am terrible at the game. I always did fairly well in English at school, but after years of using spell checkers, I have started to doubt my spelling ability. So we wanted to find another puzzle like game where seeing patterns or paths was a primary element.

Ricochet Robot fills this need nicely, but it also came with an added, unexpected bonus. It is also a great solo game, which I will go into shortly.

The components of the game are fairly simple, depending on which edition you get, there are either 4 or 5 robots,

4 double sided board sections (which can combine to make 96 unique play areas according to the manufacturer),

a robot marker tile for each coloured robot and a bunch of round target chits.


All in all, the game components are fairly well made, with the robots themselves feeling nice and heavy and substantial, but I had a minor problem with my board sections being bowed slightly, making the board difficult to line up. I'm sure after sitting them under something heavy for a while this won't be a problem any longer.

The first time I brought this out for my partner and I to have a look at, she thought that the board was a bit bland, but as I explained the moves to her, especially about the coloured 45 degree barriers, she started to like that the board was nice and simple. I like that as well.

The rules suggest that in a 2 player game you go until one player has collected 8 chits, and I found this to be a good length. We are usually fairly matched (although she keeps reminding me that mens visio-spacial skills should be better than womens, but I guess that's what you get for being with a Psychology student) so by the time one person has 8 chits the other usually has quite a few as well.

I don't think this will replace Boggle for her completely, or our other games, but it will be hitting the table a lot as a good solid puzzler.

Now onto the solo play. I was setting up the game the other night when My partner got a call from her sister, wanting to know if she would go over and look after their first child while the ducked off to the hospital to have their second. I know, I thought it was quite rude that the birth of my new nephew would interrupt a pleasant game evening ( ) But I though, what the heck, the board was set up, so I decided to play a few rounds to get some practice in.

4 hours later I decided I needed some sleep. I guess the deep puzzle aspect to the game hadn't really hit me because I was always trying to be quick to find the answers. When playing on my own, I really enjoyed checking and double checking the paths that I'd found, and often as a result found a better path 3 or 4 minutes late.

All in all I find Ricochet Robots a Solid couples game, and I really enjoy the solo play aspect as well.