If you've just read my review of the Faqir board game (here), you'll know that Blog-Match matched us up with Tactic Games who kindly sent us two board games to try out. The second one that we received was Dotto.
It's a dice game in which you need a mixture of luck, fast fingers and skill to win and, in some ways, it reminded me of a more child-friendly version of Yahtzee, using colour patterns rather than number ones. The suggested age range is 7+ but 6-year-old Juliette soon picked up the aim of the game and managed to play quite successfully.
The basic idea is simple - you use the different coloured sides of the 10 dice to recreate the patterns on the 55 cards. In fact, Juliette was quite happy just doing this for a while as I read the rules and set up the game.
To make things more exciting, the game comes with a timer which gives you a random amount of time that could be anything from 20 to 70 seconds. Because you never know when it's going to go off, it often makes you jump which was a source of many giggles ! There are also Skip and Reverse cards, which cause you to miss a turn or for the order of play to be reversed, which can spice things up a bit more.
Setting up the game before playing for the first time threw up a couple of problems (although they were easily overcome). The timer needs 3 AAA batteries which are not included (which I thought was a shame as many toymakers have started providing the batteries now) and a small screwdriver to insert them, which provoked a bit of frantic rummaging in drawers before we could begin playing. The board needs you to press out 16 small cardboard squares to make the holes for the dice, and the box also contains about the same number of tokens. My eco-friendly radar thought that this was a waste of resources as the pressed-out squares could have easily been used as the tokens.
These small niggles aside though, it was a fun game that everybody enjoyed, particularly as it is a very quick game to play (about ten minutes) so it's ideal if you want some quality time with the kids but are rushed off your feet.
star rating : 4.5/5
RRP : £19.99
for more information on Tactic games : http://www.tactic.net/
stockist details : http://www.carouseltoyshop.co.uk/
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looks great but my kids are a bit too young for it just now!
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a good game, I get really annoyed when you realise that you need a screwdriver to open the battery compartment, grrrr!!
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