Mini Review - Geistesblitz

2 to 8 players, Ages 8+, 20-30 Minute Playing time
A review copy of Geistesblitz was kindly provided by the publishers Zoch GmbH.

Geistesblitz is a fun game about speed of recognition / action where there are 5 wooden objects, a White Ghost, Red Chair, Green Bottle, Blue Book and a Grey Mouse and a deck of 60 cards. Each card has 2 of the objects represented by their physical image and importantly by their colour. On most of the cards the objects are coloured incorrectly so you might have a green mouse sitting in a blue chair. However on some of the cards one of the images will be correctly coloured e.g. a White Ghost holding a Red Bottle.

The wooden objects are placed in the centre of the table and the game then proceeds with all the cards face down being passed to the active player. The active player turns over the top card and then all the players have the opportunity to either grab the correctly coloured object on the card OR the object that is missing from the card i.e. neither its image nor colour is present. The person who is the first to correctly grab the object receives the card. They will also receive a card from any players that get it wrong! We played without this option and would recommend that you do likewise for your first game as players are familiarising themselves with the images, particularly when playing with young children and adults like me!

As the active player if you grab or call out the correct object you retain the deck of cards and turn over the next card. If not then the rules say you pass the deck to the person who was correct, in our games we simplified this so that the deck was always passed to the next person in a clockwise direction. The winner being the player who has the most cards when the deck is exhausted.

This is a game clearly targeted at families and in particular children. Our experience is that they will love it and have a lot of fun playing it but that it will also help to develop skills around colour and shape recognition, plus speed of reaction and analysis skills.

However as with so many of the Zoch games it is really good fun and will also work for:

· Gamers as a light filler when time is short at the beginning / end of a games evening.

· Social Gamers who will I believe really enjoy this simple yet testing game.

· Non gamers who are up for a fun game that will be boisterous and have lots of interplay between the players as they frequently grab the wrong object.

A wooden ghost and happy confusion

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If you liked this review then other games I have reviewed can be seen here