Designed by: Salim Berghiche
The Genius Square is a puzzle game where two players (or more, if you have more than one copy of the game) race to fill out out a 6×6 grid.
The box comes with two grids, a set of wooden blockers and coloured tetronimo pieces for each player, and some dice. Before play starts, the dice are rolled to establish where exactly the wooden blocker should be placed in both player’s grids: A2, C4, F6 and so on. Once both players have put their blockers in position, the race begins: the first player to fill out their grid with the pieces – working around the blockers – is the winner.
You can play a single game, or a number of rounds. Although the grid is small, there are apparently over 60,000 combinations of how the blockers and tetronimos can fill it!
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The rules are almost not there - but the brain-burning is; figuring out how the shapes will fit around the blockers can be easy, or tricky, depending on the fall of the dice.
There are many, many, different ways the game can be set up, but ultimately there's no variety in play.
1-2
Players
6+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
Although there's certainly a game here, The Genius Square feels very much like a puzzle: a revisitable puzzle, a clever puzzle, and fun to do, but although there's 62000 solutions, the experience is always the same and after a few plays in our house, interest in it waned rather quickly. It's one of those things that has a clever bit of engineering to it, and that can feel more-ish at first - but ultimately repeat visits for us got less exciting as the novelty wore off. That can be the rub with puzzle-games - even when there are multiple solutions they can begin to feel 'solved'. I think the linked games to the right offer a similar puzzle-vibe (with the caveat they're a bit more complicated!) whilst bringing a whole lot more play to the experience.