Crack the code, one punch card at a time

With Gen Con behind us it is time to start playing games we bought there. We are not yet home, we are still doing a last detour to Niagara Falls - so the hotel bed is our table. 😅

We were quite interested in Turing Machine, a newly released logical deduction game, so we pre-ordered it for Gen Con pickup. If you like Awkward Guests or Search for Planet X, this should also be right up your alley. This has no theme though, it is just pure math. 😀

The goal of the game is two find a given 3-digit number. The way you do that, is by asking 4 to 6 criteria cards about your educated guesses, each time finding out more and more information - you can ask three machines each round, and can also try to solve, but failing means losing immidiately.

During setup you search for the given criteria cards and their verifier cards - there are millions of problems to solve that an app generates. 🙀 The app is only for setup and entering the solution.

The way you ask machines is by picking out punch-cards for each digit. These all have a bunch of holes in them - if you line the three of them up, only one hole remains visible. You put a verifier card behind them, which shows a grid of crosses ❌️ and checkmarks ✅, and only one of those will be visible.

So for example: you have the number 343 and ask the criteria card about it, that knows how many '4's are in the solution. You see an 'X' in the hole - it means one '4' is incorrect. Now you know it is either zero, two or three '4's. 🧐

There are about 40 different criteria cards in the game, each checking some kind of correlation between the digits. 😯

We did find that easy problems could be solved as fast as 2 rounds and lucky guesses early could mean winning, so going for problems with 5-6 verifiers is better. Understanding the logic of some cards was quite hard, but it is awesome when clarity strikes. This game is a mathematical marvel for sure. 🤯 Also this is not the game with too much banter. You are just deeply lost in thought and murmuring stuff to yourself all game long. 😅

I also love the design of the box which has holes in it akin to a punch card. The green that you see is from the rule book! 😍