Turing Tumble

Today, as part of our little Back to School educational series, I’m going to be looking at Turing Tumble, another game from Upper Story, who also produced Spintronics and Bridge or Bust, which I featured a little bit before the summer holidays. I’m really looking forward to telling you about this one.

I’ve actually had this in my house for several months, but because Upper Story’s games are a little bit more expensive, although let me start off by saying they are well worth it, I didn’t want to review Turing Tumble and their other set, Spintronics, really close together. Simply because buying all of them at the same time is a big ask. I will get to reviewing Spintronics a bit closer to Christmas.

At just over £80, Turing Tumble is the cheapest of all of their sets, and they actually do a really nice bundle at the moment with Turing Tumble and Spintronics thrown in together. As I said, I will review Spintronics a little bit closer to Christmas.

Turing Tumble isn’t really a board game in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a series of logic puzzles played on a large upright board where you build working mechanical computers powered entirely by gravity and marbles. There are no batteries, screens or electronics involved. Instead, it works on the basis of recreating how logic gates and transistors work. In fact, these sets are so good that we use them as part of our teaching at the school I work at.

The included book contains 60 puzzles spliced into the story of Alia, a space engineer who has become stranded on a remote planet. Each puzzle gives you a particular objective, a starting layout and a selection of pieces you’re allowed to use. Your job is to work out where those pieces need to go to make the machine produce the required result.

I really like the fact that there is a story and not just a set of puzzles. It means that there’s something to follow and it makes you want to continue more than if it was just an arbitrary set of puzzles. The artwork is really nice and everything is produced really well.

It’s an incredibly small thing, but I do wish that the book wasn’t spiral bound and that it was bound more traditionally. This is only because I worry that, as it sits in the box and gets used, the spiral binding is going to get damaged. If you look after it then it’ll be fine, but it just wouldn’t have been my choice, especially with what is otherwise a really premium product.

What I will say, though, and what is actually really nice, is that on Upper Story’s website all of the extra bits are available as replacement parts. So, if you lose or break something, it’s not the end of the world as you can buy all of the replacement bits.

You can, in fact, also download the digital files for all of the pieces so that you can 3D print your own pieces or make modifications to them. While this isn’t necessarily going to be ideal for everyone, this is extremely cool for older kids or anyone wanting to use this as part of a teaching tool. Upper Story are really leading the charge with this kind of community integration and I absolutely love it.

The one thing that doesn’t come in the base box that I would recommend spending the extra few pounds on is the Turing Tumble Marble Reloader. It’s a little tube thing with elastic bands and a catch release that basically makes it easy to pick up the marbles in the correct order that you’re supposed to pick them up in.

While you don’t need this, it does make life a lot easier and I would really recommend it. Obviously, it’s been left out of the main box to save money as it’s not absolutely necessary, but I would definitely recommend picking it up.

Back to the review.

At the top of the board are two supplies of marbles, one red and one blue. When you release a marble, it travels down through whatever components you’ve added to the board. If it reaches one of the levers at the bottom, that can then release another marble from the top, meaning your little machine can continue running all by itself.

You start with fairly straightforward ramps, which simply direct a marble left or right, but gradually more components are introduced. Crossovers allow two routes to pass through one another, while interceptors can stop a marble completely.

The really important pieces are the “bits”. These flip every time a marble passes through them, changing which direction the next marble will travel. Because the two positions can represent a 0 and a 1, which is the basis for how all computers work, they allow the machine to actually store information.

Later, you also gain access to gear bits and gears. Gear bits work in a similar way to normal bits, except several of them can be connected together, so changing one can change others elsewhere on the board. Combining all of these surprisingly simple pieces lets you create machines capable of counting, performing logic and even carrying out basic mathematical operations.

Once you’ve built what you think is the solution, you release the first marble and essentially let your computer “program” run. You don’t interfere with it once it’s going. If the marbles come out in the correct order or complete whatever task the puzzle has asked for, you’ve solved it. If they don’t, you look at what happened, make some changes and try again.

That’s really the clever idea at the heart of Turing Tumble. Rather than writing computer code on a screen, you’re physically constructing the logic yourself and can actually watch the information moving through your computer one marble at a time. It’s really cool and an excellent STEM teaching tool.

I can’t recommend Turing Tumble enough. I think this is yet another excellent STEM teaching tool from Upper Story. While just over £80 does seem like quite a bit, you are getting the main game and the loader, which I do think is worth it. For just over £70 you can pick up the base game on its own, and for a curious, STEM-loving child this could be an excellent back-to-school toy, or something that you can put in the loft ready for Christmas.