Every player starts with face-up and face-down cards in front of them, and can use actions during their turn to build the rainbow (which has to be done in Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, etc sequence), check out their face-down cards or swap cards with another player. If you talk to your teammates and you have a little luck, you can start a chain of rainbow-building going. Where you might trip up though is drawing a Magic Power card, which immediately goes down on the table and has colours added to it as the game progresses. If the colours build up too much with a Magic Power, you lose the power along with all of those colour cards which will severely affect your ability to build rainbows. It’s in your interest to clear colour cards attached to Magic Powers as quickly as possible, by matching them with colours of your own. This is where communication is truly useful.
Generally, while the game passed the time well enough, it wasn’t a very fun experience. Mostly it was because of the mechanic of the Magic Powers – true, they were there to mix up the action a little instead of making it into a multiplayer game of Solitaire, but they were a nuisance that could make or break your game in a way that felt kind of unfair, and when you ‘won’ a magic power, it wasn’t usually that helpful anyway which just made it even more annoying.
I think this game suffers a little from a lack of balance, although I wonder if I wasn’t playing it correctly – the instructions were a little ambiguous here and there, so we may have been a bit more loose with the rules than intended. If you have enough people you can easily co-ordinate your actions to complete rainbows and if you’re only playing with a small number of people, it’s very difficult. Overall, not that satisfying – if you’re into collaborative card games and colours, try Hanabi instead.
Designer: Ian Brody
Publisher: Griggling Games
Mechanic: Card Game, Puzzle
Number of Players: 1-4
Length of Game: 30 minutes
Complexity: Easy
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