Tesseract Review

The intro on the back of the box says “The Tesseract appeared in our skies six days ago, over the exact magnetic north of the planet. It was the size of a city block. Since that time it has been condensing, collapsing upon itself. It can now fit into the palm of your hand.” How convenient! We can now play the game.

Tesseract is a co-operative dice manipulation game that takes about an hour, and plays 1-4. In the solo mode, you just play both sides of a two player game, so it has a solid solo mode (many other games achieve this by giving you an extra set of rules and/or cards, with the result that the solo mode feels completely different to the game played with more players). I’m not normally a solo gamer, but the puzzle in this game really tempted me.

The Tesseract consists of a cube of 64 dice. There are 16 pink dice, 16 light blue dice, 16 orange dice, and 16 yellow dice. The publishers (Smirk & Laughter Games) did a really good job with choosing those dice colours, as they are different enough that you can easily distinguish the colours of the dice in just about any lighting condition. Also, although all of the D6 dice have the same 6 symbols on their faces, you’ll soon realize that you don’t have to learn any of those symbols, because those symbols are just the normal spotting of a die given a sci-fi twist.

The goal of game is to disassemble the Tesseract and fill a containment matrix of 24 dice, before you exhaust all the dice in the Tesseract, or experience 7 breaches. Sounds easy enough – disassemble a 64 dice cube and create a 24 dice rectangle – but it’s not that straight forward. Standing in your way is the base plate, and the primed area.

The base plate sits under the Tesseract and contains a series of icons in a 4x4 matrix, and once one of those is revealed (ie, when the last die in a column of the Tesseract is removed), bad things happen. There are four double sided baseplates (numbered 1 to 8), and these allow you to ramp up the difficulty. Level 1 is more than challenging enough, but you might want to see if you can beat the Tesseract at higher levels. It’s worth noting that the order of difficulty is not 1 to 8; instead the order is 15263748.

Every player has a lab board which has space for six dice. On your turn, you can choose any three of these actions

· Remove a cube from the Tesseract and place it on your lab board.

· Increase or decrease by one the value of a cube in the primed area or your lab board.

· Move a cube from your lab to an empty space on another player’s board (or vice versa).

· Discard one of your research cards to get one of the next higher level.

· Move a cube from your lab board to the containment matrix

· Exercise one of your character powers

So, on your turn, you could move a die from another player’s board to your board (with their permission, of course), change its value from 3 to 4, and then move the die onto the containment matrix. I should point out that you can change the 1 on a die in the primed area to a zero, and in so doing destroy it (you remove it from the primed area).

After a player has completed their turn, the die that is lowest in value and height is removed from the Tesseract, rolled and placed into the primed area (which is right next to the Tesseract).

So, in a game of 4 players, (at least) 4 dice are moved from the Tesseract to the primed area in every round. That matters because if there are ever three dice of the same value in the primed area, a breach occurs and you have to move the breach counter up by one. And remember I mentioned that bad things happen when a column is exhausted on the Tesseract (revealing an icon on the base plate)? Well one of those “bad things” could be moving two dice from the Tesseract to the primed area. So needless to say, managing the dice in the primed area is just as important as filling the containment matrix.

The containment matrix consists of a 4x6 matrix where the four rows represent the colours of the dice, and the six columns represent the numbers on the dice. In order to fill in the matrix, you have to add dice 1 to 6 in all four colours. However, you can’t just place any die you want on the matrix. In order to move a die from your lab board to the containment matrix, you first need to have at least three dice with the same number (regardless of the dice colour) or at least three dice of the same colour in sequential order (eg, 123 or 3456). When you meet that condition, you can place one of those dice in the containment matrix, if there is a matching empty space for it. Then, if the dice you just placed in the containment matrix (colour and value) is present in the primed area, you can remove that dice from the primed area.

Each time you the fill in a row or a column in containment matrix, you get a containment card. Keeping track of the powers on the containment cards, the research cards and the character cards is another key to winning the game. Although each of the powers on these cards are straightforward, keeping track of all of them as well as the state of the Tesseract, the state of the containment matrix and the state of the primed area may put you in a state of information overload. For our group, this was nirvana as we would chat about what to do next in a constructive fashion. However, I can easily see this being a game where the best player (or the most aggressive one) might guide (force) the group to follow a particular strategy.

The game does feel repetitive in the early stages, and I can see the potential for analysis paralysis. I think the cooperative nature of the game helps to reduce this, but as every player has to make his own decision about what actions to take, this can really slow down the game and make it less enjoyable for everyone else.

The designer and the publisher made every effort to make this game thematic, but the theme is barely there. Nonetheless, our group really liked Tesseract. The game is easy to set up and explain, and it looks great on the table. It’s very well balanced, and we loved the increasing tension in the latter half of the game as the primed area is filling up and the Tesseract is dissolving.

If you like puzzle games, you have to get Tesseract. I wrote a blog on best puzzle games, and I gave the title of “Best Dice Puzzle Game” to Noctiluca. Tesseract has replaced Noctiluca in that category, and I’d also give Tesseract the title of “Best Cooperative Puzzle Game” (a category that I didn’t originally have in my blog).