Coming to us from Big Potato Games, ColourBrain Disney Edition is a colour matching card game centred around your knowledge of Disney characters and based on the original ColourBrain mechanics.
Choosing from a selection of colour cards, players must answer a question with either one card or a combination of two or three cards to answer a plethora of Disney based questions. Being the first to place your cards down and shouting ColourBrain starts a 15 second countdown for the remaining players to get their answers in. Getting the answer right doesn’t guarantee you victory or points in a round since your score is determined by the number of teams or players who get the question wrong. So if everyone is correct, nobody scores and a point is carried to the next question, if two are correct and two are incorrect then the the victorious two players/teams get two points each.
In addition to the colour cards, each player is armed with a capture card adding a further dynamic to gameplay. Only playable between rounds and only ever applied to the leader at that point in time, the capture card allows you to remove eight of the eleven cards in their hand effectively handicapping them on the next round. We found in practice that every player in rotation played it once someone reached 7-8 points causing some frustration for the leader. Effective in elongating playtime as-well as allowing players to catch a runaway player; it also had the unforeseen consequence of upsetting our 10 year old who thought she had the game in the bag only to be disabled by the family for her sister to then come from behind to win after three rounds.
Built for one to four teams of one to three players per team, the box suggests a player age of 8 plus. In reality you can play (as we did) with players under 8. The key challenge is hand size (never thought I’d say that), little ones understand the questions and likely know more answers than their parents given the source material but will struggle to effectively “fan” the eleven colour cards and find the appropriate ones inside the 15 second pressure timer after the first player lands their cards.
We ended up stretching the rules for our youngest who loved the game, knew the answers but couldn’t work quite fast enough and just ended up with her cards face up on the table relying on the honesty of her family and friends not to copy her answers, the fix lies in the team mechanic and allows young ones to play with older siblings or parents handling the cards.
In terms of quality, the colour cards are large, weighty in comparison to a standard playing card and have a thread material with gloss finish. Game cards are clearly illustrated and show both the logo of the film from which the question originated as well as the number of colours needed to answer, on the flip side a high quality image from the film depicting the answers. Game cards are much smaller at around 50% of the size of a colour card and notably more delicate.
Although you can play with younger players, the cards won’t stand up to picking or grabbing hence the age suggestions for players. Again this can be avoided by the team makeup with an adult or more dexterous and delicate sibling taking control with a collaborative effort in answering the questions.
In a first to ten point game, with four players or teams, we found games last around 15 mins and given the number of question cards in the box it’s very easy to keep playing for well over an hour without repetition. We also had fun reminiscing around the scenes depicted on the question cards with the kids leading to a Disney movie session directly after our first game.
Enjoyed by both the adults in our house and loved by the kids, ColourBrain Disney Edition is the type of game that brings families together around the table, it’s fast enough to set up that kids don’t get bored waiting and it’s interesting enough to hold the attention of the smallest players for a good while. My kids have requested we replay it five days out of seven this week already.
ColourBrain Disney Edition is available now from Amazon.
