Flash Review — Tesseract

Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: fine
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60 min
Complexity: 5/10

A tesseract (a four-dimensional cube) has appeared in the sky, and a bunch of scientists must work together to disarm it before it destroys our universe.

Forget the thin sci-fi conceit: Tesseract is a cooperative game where players slowly dismantle a (three-dimensional) cube made out of dice they then manipulate to perform a variety of tasks. Get the job done before the tesseract finishes counting down, and you win.

Pretty colors can kill you!

The menu of operations available to players is a mix of classic (rotate a die, flip a die, change a die’s color) and innovative (exchange dice with a collaborator, manipulate a die to affect another die remotely, put a die back in the tesseract), all aimed at completing an array of 24 tasks before time runs out.

7 tasks down, 17 to go

The tesseract eliminates at least one of its own dice every turn, and whenever a column is empty, it triggers the base-plate symbol just revealed—and those are no good. Also, if the tesseract ever runs out of dice, the game is lost. But the fascinating thing here is that the raw resources players must use to defuse the ticking time-bomb are the tesseract’s dice themselves. So you have to speed up the timer if you ever hope to stop it. There’s no playing it safe.

That orange symbol removes an additional die from the tesseract. Sorry.

The components are great fun, the lazy susan (gentle!) the tesseract rests on works like a charm, and you do feel the mounting pressure throughout the game. With four different difficulty levels and a gazillion possible starting setups—just look at that cube—the experience should remain challenging for a long time.

Solo gameplay involves a single player going at it two-handed. It’s not my favorite solo system, but it works well.

I’ll just add that the official age suggestion seems out of line here: an interested 10-year-old could certainly play Tesseract without any problem. (Maybe even at 8; kids are sharp.)

Most easily forgotten rule: When you contain a die from the tesseract, you get to destroy an identical die (color and value) from the Primed Area.



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