Colorful Review

As the game card turned over it gave me my category for the round. MAGICAL. I briefly scanned my hand before announcing 'Unicorn', as I laid my purple card face-down. Josh then took the final turn, announcing 'Rain'. I had several cards in my hand that would work for this, Sky Blue, Grey or Blue. Unsure on the choice I looked at his category. SONG. Everyone else eagerly played their cards with a confident look, it was just me hesitating. As I scanned my hand a second time I noticed the card I had overlooked last round, Pink. Suddenly, I realized the mistake I had made with my previous choice, the tune of Purple Rain softly playing in the back of my mind....

All The Colours

Colorful comes in a fairly small sized box, only needing two stacks of cards and the instructions to get you going to play. That gives it a good sturdy structure, and the depth of the box holds the lid on fairly well, meaning I can drop this into my bag on a games night without having to worry about losing all the cards to the bottom. The cards feel of a nice quality, which is good seeing as they are the only components. The art for the cards and box is simple and minimalist, the gold foil title making it easy to pick out from the shelf. Perhaps my one slight annoyance is that the game doesn't use the UK spelling and I have incorrectly typed it into search engines trying to find it several times.

Overview

Up to 6 people can play Colorful. Everyone gets their own set of identical colour cards, each with a unique card back to identify their own set. All the other cards will form a deck in the middle. These cards each contain 4 categories that relate to a certain topic, the active player will be using one of the categories to give a clue related to a colour card in their hand that is played face-down on the table, everyone else trying to match the card. Over 5 rounds the goal of the game is for the players to cooperate and match every single colour successfully, but if that fails then the players all compete competitively to see who as matched the most majorities to win.

I Can See A Rainbow

On explaining the rules the game sounds simple, but after starting to play you'll find out it has some more complications than it first seems. For starters, players won't get to choose which category they want to use, the categories on the cards are sorted by number, so the round you are in dictates the category you get. The cards are set up so the categories tend to be slightly broader and easier in the first round, and not so much later on. A good example is the food topic card, starting off nicely with the category of 'food' giving plenty of options, the last round category is flavour, which is slightly harder to put a word to a colour. Another aspect of the game to consider is your own individual hand of cards. Every round starts with the same set of cards, but only 10 of 15, which are chosen at random before you begin. Every card played stays face down until the game ends, so you won't know what mistakes have been made, and how a very easy and obvious choice to you might not be the same to everyone else, and by the time the final round rolls around the player choosing the clue only has 6 cards remaining to pick from, and most likely they're the leftovers that no one could think of a sufficient clue for.

Variants

The game comes with enough category cards to play several times without seeing any repeats, and each time you can have a different selection of cards to use. But if you fancy changing it up there are a few included variants to change the difficulty, bringing a different game experience.

Teams - Before the game begins arrange yourselves into teams of minimum 2 each, at the game end your team only gets a point for a round if every member was part of the majority scoring that round.

Base Category - Each round, when revealing the category, use the clue as written on the card, there is no need to come up with a word. This adds a much harder level of difficulty for the game, not being able to narrow down your clues, but it does remove the need for thinking of words and those terrible panic clues that can appear.

Double Colours - Everyone keeps all 15 cards during set up. Now whenever you give a word clue you place two colours down, not just one, and everyone has to match the exact two colours with their cards. You'll probably find a few rounds where every player plays a completely different pair of cards.

7-12 Players - With two copies of the game you can turn it into a large group game, you'll play a number of rounds equal to the number of players so everyone gets a turn.

Final Thoughts

Colorful is a fun game that will tend to get a few laughs as the game goes on, usually mid round as someone realises exactly when they messed up before. Good for breaking out as a quick filler, and it can fit in larger groups, providing that you have two copies of the box. If you've played any pick a word game then you'll find a few similarities here, and some people may find that outstays its welcome, especially those who tend to move away from playing word or party games and look for something a bit more substantial. But from experience I've always enjoyed my plays and have found the included variants have really mixed it up to give plenty of options to replay with some different experiences.