Review: Connecto (Blam!) – English

Are you fast, do you know how to colour within the lines and are you also good at deciphering your own handwriting (actually more like scribbles)? If the answer to all these questions is yes, then the party game Connecto might be tailor-made for a player like you and if not, you will be drawn from life!

In Connecto, players will simultaneously solve 8 ‘riddles’. Each ‘riddle’ is a card with all the little pictures on it. These pictures indicate how players should draw the hint on their personal board. You heard me correctly: players are going to draw the hints. By the way, they all do this at the same time, so time pressure plays a role. Did you used to make drawings where you had to connect different numbers in order by drawing straight lines between them and that you made a drawing this way? Connecto is exactly that, but in game form combined with an entertaining element of stress.

All players each have a board with all rows and columns consisting of different small pictures. Each turn, in the middle of a table, there is a card also containing small pictures. A line runs through some of the pictures. This indicates that players must draw a straight line between these pictures. If the card next to a picture shows a shooting star, this indicates that players should draw a curve around this picture on their board. If a picture is shown isolated on the card, players should circle this picture as if it were quarantined with a bubble.

As soon as a player, after some scribbling, figures out which word he or she is drawing, he or she can take the hourglass, turn it over after which the other players have only seconds left to continue drawing and make a guess. At the end of the time, the word of the matching card is revealed. If a player has given the correct answer, that player gets 1 point. The player who grabbed the hourglass managed to give the correct answer gets a bonus point. Before taking the hourglass, a player must be sure of his or her case, because if the answer is incorrect, this player gets a minus point.

The words to guess are in the booklet and there are only a limited number of riddles, but there are so many cards in the game that you are not going to remember them all easily. At least I think so. Connecto is a funny party game for in between games and fun to play with a larger group. It is fun to see players making mistakes due to time pressure and some puzzle cards are still quite difficult to guess. Fun for fans of fast-paced party games.