Matthew BaileyGame 4 of the “Games that Jack(8.) and I played at the UKGE” is “thrufour”
Now let’s get something out of the way. I wasn’t overly impressed by this but the whole demo of the game left both myself and Jack with a slightly sour taste.
So on the unfathomable off chance the guy who demoed us thrufour is in this group here is some honest feedback.
thrufour (no capital) is a shape-sorting tetromino puzzle game where you have to make a 4×4 grid of shapes in 5 layers but leave holes blank.
So for example the first puzzle tasks you with leaving a hole in the top left square of the grid. You then have to build 5 layers making sure that you always leave a hole in the top left square and in turn ensure that over the course of the layers, no other holes are left free.
The first problem is making 5 squares with an exact number of pieces is really difficult. We are both pretty good at this kinda thing but we struggled. The other issue is that once you have managed that then lining the holes up on purpose (hopefully a bit of layer rotating might help you) is harder (and this was puzzle 1 of 300).
Now as we got stuck on the top layer the guy suggested that we separate the layers so we can look at them individually. From a tactile point of view having to clumsily separate the layers wasn’t a great experience and didn’t make the whole thing flow. This then leads me to think why not just make them as 5 separate layers to begin with?
The person we spoke to was very over-enthusiastic and definitely could have done with turning the dial down a little bit. The way he said they were 100% funded on Kickstarter (not hard when your goal is £250) and the fact he kept saying it was “300 puzzles in one” and “not like other shape sorting puzzles” just made the whole thing come across very “used car salesman.”
I would also suggest in future to the people demoing it that the UKBGE is not the place to be wearing smart business wear if you want to warm up to your potential buyers… read the room.
It’s also way bigger than it needs to be I suspect to artificially add the perception of value. Priced at £45 (it’s currently on Kickstarter) is a lot of money for what is essentially a laser-cut sheet of poplar ply which will cost you a few pounds even if you go for the absolute premium grade. I have no issue with laser-cut things (I even bought a game I will showcase later in the week that was laser-cut) but this is pushing it a bit. I will say the pieces have obviously been hand finished to make them nice and smooth so this does add some to the value proposition.
There is a pocket edition (which is far too big to fit in your pocket) which is £25 and is, to be honest, the price I think this should be along with the size leading me to suspect that this is the actual product and the larger one is a pricing decoy to make you think paying £25 for the smaller one is much better value. In reality, The pocket version should be the standard version and then you could have an even smaller actual pocket version. If you are that fussed call the larger one the XXL version as many games do.
The fact the games boxes were in an acrylic display case also irritated me (not sure why I was probably just looking for things to not like at this point)
So yeah a bit of a weird post from me (hope I didn’t come across too whingy)… don’t want this to become an “AIBU” post but I wasn’t overly sold and actually came away from the demo feeling a little uncomfortable.
And Jack felt uncomfortable as well… and he’s 8
oh and because there is no space if you actually want to put it all back in the box you need to essentially solve the puzzle.
EDIT: IT SEEMS THAT THE VERSION WE USED MAY HAVE BEEN AN OVERSIZED DEMO VERSION AND THE MAIN VERY IS A LOT SMALLER. I CANT WORK OUT WHETHER THIS IS GOOD OR BAD.
