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Players: 2-6 (ages 6+)
Playing Time: 12 minutes
The object of Thing-a-ma-Bots is to be the player with the most robots at the end of the game. At the beginning, all of the cards in the deck are dealt out and put in piles, face down, in front of each player. One by one, players take turns placing a card from their hand and then naming that crazy robot something new—anything. As more robot cards are laid, more new names are thought up to name the new robots—and you have to remember them all. When a repeat robot pops up, everyone must yell out the name that was given to that robot—a little like Slap Jack, only you’re yelling out the given robot names instead of slapping them. The first player to call out the correct name then gets the pile, and the round is over. Game play then starts again, with all new names for each robot.
When all cards have been played, the game is over—and the player with the biggest stack of robots wins.
This game is just downright confusing. It’s supposed to be for ages six and up, but my nephew had a really hard time remembering any of the names that we gave the robots. And given the fact that every robot gets a new name every round—and that all the robots look similar to each other—I don’t blame him. The cards are nicely illustrated, though, and we did like the characters of the robots—but we felt that the game play was poorly designed.
We ended up using the cards to play old-fashioned Concentration, and we liked that much better.
The Thing-a-ma-Bots card game is supposed to build creativity and memory skills, but I’m not so sure that it succeeds. It’s a nice idea, but the game just gets frustrating because no one can remember the name they made up for the robots.
