Designer: Fabien Gridel, Yoann Levet Publisher: Scorpion Masque

This is definitely a game which won’t be for everyone. There’s no pieces to move around, outside of the cleverly designed punch cards, and most of the components will remain firmly in the box while you’re playing, but if you’re a fan of deduction and logic puzzles then this game will definitely scratch that particular itch. And then some.

It’s a code deduction game, in a similar vein to Break The Code except rather than trying to determine what numbers your opponents hold, you’re playing against the machine itself. And for what is, essentially, a few cards and a whole lotta holes – this machine is a crafty beast.

It’s a simple game to set-up – each puzzle, whether it’s one of the twenty in the rulebook or the more than seven million online tells you what cards you need to get out. After that it’s just you, a notesheet, a pencil (or a pen if you’re feeling super confident) and your brain. A dry-wipe pen is included but that’s for marking the verification cards so you know which criteria they correspond to in the heat of the moment, you’ll have to source your own code-cracking scribing tool.

Eaxh criteria is, essentially, a question you can ask of the machine – is a number odd or even, high or low, repeated or a lone wolf etc – and by assembling punchcards corresponding to the numbers you want to try you get your answers from verification cards which are an eye-bending mix of red crosses and green ticks until the punchcards filter it down and provide you with an answer, or maybe more questions.

I threw myself in to one of the online puzzles straight from the get go, and got along just fine – it might take a run or two to fully understand what the answers the machine provides mean but once you get your head around the logic involved you’ll be code-breaking with the best of ‘em. And at only twenty minutes or so for each code, you’re going to have another go. And maybe just one more after that…