Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Lego


I am happy to play any game. I might not be good at some of them but I am still happy to pull up a chair and give it a go. I also find it difficult to give a game a really low score on the geek. Generally I feel like there might be something in there and someone has spent the time on putting a game together and getting it published.

Every once and a while comes along a game that I really have problems with and last weekend it was Lego Creationary. My kids like Lego, they seem to get more and more every year and are happy to build whatever there imagination creates. A couple of years ago Lego came up with a range of games, we picked up a few of the cheaper games and they were pretty good. Usually roll and move or roll and pick type games. Nothing ground breaking but they are fun and the kids enjoy them.
Creationary on the other hand is just terrible, the concept is quite good. Mix up pictionary with a box of lego and you have a new build and guess game. Players roll a dice then pick a card from one of the 3 piles of cards. Each card has 4 different objects to build on it, one for each colour on teh dice. So if you rolled a yelloe you would build the yellow transport object, green the nature object. The piles are supposed to be in different ability levels so the objects should be harder to build.

All sounds good so far, rules are a bit light with players getting a "determined" amount of time to build. We went for 5 mins, not wanting to drag things out. The ability levels of cards don't score any more or less points. I decided to handicap myself by using the level 2 cards while the kids went for level 1. I quickly changed to level 1 for the reasons below.

There are 2 major problems with this game, the amount of Lego you get just isn't enough. Not only are you limited with the amount of pieces but also the colours. My first object was a bee, easy I thought until I realized there were no black pieces in the box. I had to substitute brown for black. This happened a couple of times, Flynn got a tiger and started building one. Quickly telling us the yellow was actually orange. He ran out of pieces after building 4 legs.

Teh second issue I have with teh game is the objects. The Arc de Triumph maybe a great site in Paris but its difficult for a 7 and 8 year old to know what it is. Model T Ford, its a car!. Well yes, i'll give you that. You see a Lego car looks like a Lego car. Especially when you only have 4 big wheels and 4 tiny wheels in the box. How are kids supposed to know the difference between a transporter plane and a passenger plane. It's tough and there were a few moments when they both yelled airplane.

So, Lego Creationary is a good idea but poorly implemented. I would love to see the design team make all of the models on the card using the Lego in the box. I know that you could argue about cost and such but I think they fell short here.
The card design needs a little help, adding the names of things would also help and teach them a little as well.

Will I play it again, probably. The kids seem to enjoy it and I like to get involved but I think there will be some tweaking along the way. The best thing about the game is that the cards have sparked there imagination with other things to build which is a bonus.