Matthew BaileySo, a quick update about my surgery. It went really well and, while I am still very much out of action for a week or two, I’m hoping that, based on everything I’ve seen in the first few days (fingers crossed, which is a bit challenging for me to do at the moment!), I should be more than well enough to be regularly typing, posting and playing again come August.
Thank you so much to everyone who has sent lovely messages. I really appreciate it.
Nice Photoshop backgrounds to the box pics are a bit much atm to do one-handed 
There is, however, one game that I’ve been playing with the kids one-handed, so to speak, over the last couple of days, and I really wanted to let you know about it because it’s an update of one of Toby’s favourite games. He was very excited when it came through the door, and I think it’s something that’s really good to have for those days when you don’t want to be outside in the scorching heat and instead want the kids to do something that uses their brains over the summer.
So, Rush Hour is a really well-known logic puzzle game that you can buy in all sorts of guises, with the main branded version coming from ThinkFun, which is owned by Ravensburger. There are plenty of different expansions and sets, and the general concept of the game is that you have to slide everything around to try and get your main car, which in this version we’re about to talk about today is the red one, out through the exit.
Today, however, we’re going to talk about Rush Hour Duel, a brand-new two-player version, which is really cool as I think this is the first ThinkFun logic game to receive a two-player variant. (Please correct me if I’m wrong!) It works really well for two reasons.
Essentially, what you get in the box is two versions of Rush Hour that you can join next to each other. You both get the same puzzle to set up, then race against each other trying to solve it as quickly as you can. When you slide your red car out of the puzzle, it locks your opponent’s gate so they can no longer get their red car out, meaning you win. It’s really fun, really clever, and it works really well.
The difficulty of the puzzles is really well pitched. They go from fairly easy (although nothing ridiculously simple) at the beginning all the way up to incredibly challenging in the later ones, but that’s a good thing. You don’t want them to be too easy. The benefit of Rush Hour as well is that there are so many versions of the game that a quick search online will find you hundreds of additional puzzles should you exhaust the 40 that come in the box.
As well as being a really fun head-to-head game, what’s also pretty cool is that this is essentially just two copies of Rush Hour. So even if you had two children who really enjoyed these puzzles but didn’t necessarily want to play against each other, you could simply give them half of the set each and let them solve puzzles independently rather than competitively.
Equally, and this is something we tried that also worked quite well, I ended up having to solve a tougher puzzle while one of the kids had to solve a slightly easier one. That means you can play asymmetrical head-to-head games as well, which, even though it isn’t mentioned on the box, is something that is 100% worth doing if there’s a noticeable difference in ability, as you’d expect with children of very different ages or kids versus adults.
Component-wise, it’s all fine. I’ve never been massively keen on the ThinkFun boxes, and I’d much rather have a proper board game box. Equally, there isn’t really anything that constitutes an insert, so you’re probably going to need a couple of little baggies to keep everything organised once it’s back in the box. Other versions of Rush Hour have also come with a nice travel bag that you can throw into a rucksack or handbag and take with you, and it’s a little bit of a shame that this doesn’t have anything similar. I appreciate that, because you’re getting two copies of everything, that might have added to the cost, but I do feel it’s a bit of a missed opportunity in this incarnation, although it’s definitely not a deal-breaker. Also, the pieces don’t quite slide as smoothly as I’d like, but that may be partly because I’m playing one-handed.
If your kids really like logic puzzles, Rush Hour Duel is great. In fact, it’s probably the version of Rush Hour I’d recommend if you have more than one child or if you simply like the idea of racing against each other, because even if you don’t want to play competitively, you can just use it as two separate copies of Rush Hour.
Great job, ThinkFun. It’s another excellent excuse to stay inside when you don’t want to be out in the scorching summer heat.
Disclaimer: A copy of the game was kindly gifted to us by Ravensburger
