One great thing about trying out games with my kids is that they are always up for a new experience, no matter how silly the game sounds.
If I were to go to my gaming group and say: “You want to play a game where you put on a blindfold and try to draw a line around a race track while I use your thumb as a joystick,” I’d probably get some blank stares and maybe a GTFO.
However, my kids were all over trying this game. Which is good, because they are the perfect demographic for Turbo Kidz from Scorpion Masqué. It’s a new drawing game that’s just as silly as it sounds.
Gameplay Overview:
I’ve pretty much summed up how to play Turbo Kidz in my intro. But the basics are that you split into teams (or play competitively with time trails) and prepare to race around the track. One player on each time will be the drawer and must put on a blindfold. The other player(s) will need to help the blindfolded player trace a line around the race track using only their words and their thumb (on their non-drawing hand) as a joystick.
If the drawer goes off the course, they have to reset back to the most recent checkpoint. The first player to complete the course wins the round.
Game Experience:
Turbo Kidz is a dumb game. It’s absolutely ridiculous. A blindfolded person is trying to navigate a maze while other players shout instructions at them and yank around their thumb like they are trying to snap it off:
“Go left!”
“No more, more, more, wait stop!!!”
“Now go up a bit. No UP, thats away!”
It’s chaotic, messy… yet every single person that has played it has had a ton of fun. I’ve tried this out with my kids (five years old) and my parents (retirement age) and they all asked to play again. We usually start out on the basic track, but there are actually 16 in total, and designer Emmanuel Gauvain even managed to throw in some tricky bits in the later levels.
Eventually it wont just be moving around the track quickly. There will be jumps to navigate (take your pen completely off the paper), pipes to drive through (no talking while in the pipe), and even oil slicks to avoid (I’ll let you discover that one on your own). So needless to say, the game goes beyond just simple drawing and has some really creative levels.
The other nice thing about Turbo Kidz is that there are so many ways to play it. You can do 2v2 or 3v3. Or you can switch to cooperative mode and work together to see how fast you can beat a course. The rulebook even has a few challenges in the back to test your skills.
Final Thoughts:
Turbo Kidz is not a complicated game and it never tries to hide what it does. I feel like this is a game you can look at and know right away if it’s for your group or not. I’ll be keeping this around to play with my kids because they absolutely love it. However, it’s not a game I’d break out for game night with my main group. But that’s ok. Because as a family game, it’s a win through and through with my young ones.
