Marbelous

• Designer: Mads Floe, Kare Torndahl Kjaer
• Publisher: Kosmos
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Each turn in Marbleous, you choose a marble card on display, then roll those two or three marbles into your grid. If three or more marbles of the same color are touching, they pop, with you grabbing the scoring card matching the color and size of the group — and if you form another group after removing those marbles from the grid, those pop, too.  Make large groups, and you earn bonus markers that allow you to drop a marble of its matching color into your grid, giving you a better chance of scoring a large group.  In the advanced game, you earn a star whenever you pop two or more groups on a turn, allowing you more choice over the scoring card you grab, in addition to earning extra points at game’s end for the stars you’ve collected.

To set up, everyone gets a marble tray with a white marble in the center slot.  Each player also gets two bonus tokens.   The display is constructed with a 4×3 array of blue point cards.  The marble cards are shuffled and a display of marble cards is set up on the table.  The 52 marbles are placed into the supply.

There are 4 phases to a turn:

1] Draw a card – take one of the face up marble cards from the supply. These cards have marbles in the four main colors (red, yellow, blue and purple) as well as the occasional white marble.  White marbles are wild and count as a marble of all colors.

2] Roll marbles – rotate your card as you like and then roll the marbles down your board in the orientation seen on your card.  Thus, the marbles will either all go down one column or will go down three adjacent columns.  If a column is completely full – it already has 5 marbles in it – the marble which was supposed to roll down that column is simply discarded.

3] Optionally, spend a bonus token – discard a bonus token to take a single marble that matches the color on the token and roll that marble down any column.

4] Pop and score – if you have a set of 3 or more orthogonally connected marbles of the same color (including white marbles which are wild) – they pop and are removed from your tray.  Collect the scoring card from the grid corresponding to the color and number of marbles removed.  If you made a set of 4 or 5 marbles, you will also collect bonus tokens.  Slide any point cards down in the grid and refill from the top.  When the deck of blue point cards is exhausted, then use the orange cards.  Now check to see if there are other sets which can be popped.  If your tray is ever completely empty, you get a white marble to start in the center column just as in beginning setup.

Continue playing in clockwise fashion until you cannot add a card from the marble card deck to the display.  The game immediately ends. Players count up the points on their collected cards.  Players also score a point for each 3 marbles on their board and bonus tokens left over.  The highest score wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the most marbles left on their board at the end of the game.

My thoughts on the game

Marbelous is a puzzle game that reminded me a lot of Bubble Pop – you have to work the marbles on your board into groups that will “pop”.  It’s actually pretty easy to get a group to pop, but the catch here is that you really want to set things up to form chain reactions.  Especially if you play with the advanced rules where you are rewarded for the chain reactions.

The turns themselves are straightforward – choose a card, decide how you want to drop in the marbles and then hopefully see things pop.  There is a bit of tactical maneuvering to be done with the scoring array – there might be times when you just want to make a single group pop if a high scoring card is in the right place.  Other times, you might want to wait for a turn, hoping that you can get better scoring cards…

In the advanced game, there is a rule that feels weird – if you trigger a chain reaction, you can score any color card for the number of marbles popped.  It’s unclear why this rule isn’t in the basic game as well.   You’re already getting a bonus for the turn with a chain reaction, and this feels like it doubles the advantage.

Gameplay is easy to pick up, and there is a satisfying part each turn as you decide where to place the marbles and then watch them fill up your board.  As you only have three cards to choose from each turn, there isn’t a lot to slow the thinking – even for the most AP prone.  The game length is also limited by the fixed number of turns in the game – I think ten rounds in a 4 player game…  Our games have definitely all come in under the 30 minutes listed on the box – and this felt just right for the easy level of puzzling offered by Marbelous.

Is Marbelous marvelous?  For me, maybe a bit short of that.  It’s a little too easy on the puzzling.  But for families, this would be a great choice to pull out and let the good times roll.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor