Blinks Strategy Game System Review

Blinks is a smart tabletop game system with nine built-in games that can be played anywhere. The nine AI-powered intelligent game pieces respond to your touch and communicate with each other. Each magnetic piece knows its own game and can learn the games of the other Blinks pieces. You can also add to the original nine Blinks with expansion packs for even more games.

That might sound a little complicated, but it’s really not once you read through the instructions and start playing. You’ll need to know the basics: how to turn on the Blinks (press the button on top), how to select a game (pick up the Blink with the game you want and press and hold it for three seconds), and how to start a game (attach the game Blink to the cluster of other Blinks).

There are nine games to play. In Astro, players collect colored ore from the asteroids and try to complete all their missions first. Darkball is like Pong for the Blinks game system. In Group Therapy, keep the introverts separate from the extroverts. In Heist, fling your Blinks at the vault to take the gold. Paintbrush is a strategy game where the Blinks pieces act as brush and canvas. Puzzle 101 challenges a solo player or a group to solve a series of self-generating puzzles. WHAM plays like Whac-a-Mole. Zen Flow is for when you need to relax and bliss out at your desk. And in the Widgets game, the Blink becomes a dice, a spinner, a coin flip, and a timer for any game you want to play. Plus, there are four games to play with the Widget: Takeaway Dice, Flip Bet, Topple Stones, and Spinomino.

In each game, the Blinks light up in a certain way, and you’ll need to pay attention to the colors and patterns to know what your Blink needs to do. Within each game, you may also need to provide player input through four different types of button presses. The single-click is just a quick press and release. The double-click is kind of like clicking a mouse button, just two quick presses. There’s also a multi-click of three or more rapid presses. And a long press and hold of no more than 1.5 seconds. That one was the hardest to master because if you press and hold too long, you may reset the Blink or put it to sleep.