My favourite board game is called Hues and Cues. I first played it with some friends at a local board game cafe and I absolutely loved it, so I bought a copy for myself immediately after!
The premise of the game is to guess the colour on the corresponding game board with minimal clues. The game board is a huge chart of colours with different letters and numbers that correspond to each colour. There are 480 colours on the board. Yep, you read that right! You have 3 game pieces: one to keep track of points (there is a tally at the top of the board) and the other two pieces are used to place your guesses for the colour that’s being described. There is a deck of cards that each has 4 colours with coordinates on it. The player picks one colour on the card and has to describe it in one word. However, you cannot use actually colour names as descriptions. It has to be either what is considered a tertiary colour or a word that emulates the colour you are describing. For example, if you pick a colour that say, is similar to a firetruck, you can say “firetruck” but you obviously can’t say “red”. You also cannot refer to an object in the room, you cannot reference to where on the board the colour is. and you cannot repeat a previously said cue. After the first “cue”, players place their first game piece on their guess. Each spot on the board can only be claimed once so be quick with your guess! After everyone places their first guess, another “cue” can be given, but this time the cue can have two words. This can be helpful if no one’s first guess was close to the colour on the card. Because you can use two words, you can get a bit more specific and creative! It’s also interesting to see how different people interpret colours based on cues they’re given. For example, if you said “sky” or “ocean” there is a huge variety of guesses that people could make because there are so many different types of colours the sky or the ocean could be!
Now I realise I haven’t touched on the scoring aspect yet. In the box, there is a 3x3 square that is used to determine scoring. Any guess immediately on the outside of the square (so any of the spaces directly surrounding it) are worth 1 point. Any of the 8 colours inside of the square are worth 2 points. If your guess is dead on (which is the centre of the square and is only 1 colour), you get 3 points! It can be very tricky to get 3 points but I’ve able to do it many times! For the cue giver, any guesses inside of the scoring frame are worth 1 point each. Typically when I play, we play until someone reaches the max amount of points on the tally on the board!
The more you play this game, the more you try to decipher how similar yet very different colours are!
Here is a picture of the game board, so you have an idea of what I mean by there are a LOT of colours:
That sounds really interesting... I really want to check that out
I love playing this game with family and friends. Especially because my husband and his father are both professionally Red Seal journeyman painters, so they know their colours and how to describe them VERY well 😂 I find that this game isn’t very well known, so I always recommend it to anyone and everyone!