Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
“Daddy? Is this a math game?”
My son recently helped me rip open a box of new games from our partners at Blue Orange, including the new game Scatter Brain. The package was interesting—a pink snow globe-style head on a small tin can that looked like it held a small treasure trove of cards. My son then read the side of the container:
“Scatter Brain–The Quick-Thinking Match & Grab Counting Game.”
Yep, sounds like a math game to me!
Scatter Brain attempts to carry on the great tradition of other real-time snatch/slap/grab games at our house such as Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, Gimme That!, Galaxy Trucker, and to a certain degree, co-op games like Quicksand. Somebody scatters 10 cards on the table, featuring numbers that range from 3-18. Then someone rolls the four pink dice before people scramble to grab any cards that match either a single die face or a total based on any number of rolled dice.
For example, let’s say there’s an 11 on the table. If three of the rolled dice showed a six, four, and one, that equals the card’s total, so it’s a legal grab. Any cards grabbed illegally cause the person who touched those cards to miss the next round, which has proven to be a killer in such a short game. When all the cards get “got”, players deal out another 10 cards and roll the dice again. Rinse and repeat until the deck is out of cards, and the player with the most cards wins.
That’s the whole game. My kids and I played it a few times and thought it was breezy, but both kids (ages 8 and 10) felt that I (age…more than 10) had a distinct advantage as a math whiz.
But I found that this was not always the case, because even if I had a math skills advantage, I don’t have a speed advantage over the kids like I used to. Angrily grabbing at cards is paradise for a kid, so it was fun to mix the mathing with the grabbing in a time block that never eclipsed five minutes of playtime. (That made Scatter Brain the polar opposite of my first play of Nucluem: Australia, which clocked in north of three hours. Gosh, it’s great to have some short games around the house!!)
So, the game was fun…for a night. No one wanted to play this again after the first day we had it out on the kitchen table. Scatter Brain proved to be tight at my table with three players, so there’s no way (NO WAY) I’m putting this on the table at the game’s suggested full player count of eight human beings.
There you go. Scatter Brain was alright, and a fun activity if only for a night!
Scatter Brain details
- Designer: N/A
- Artists: N/A
- Publishers: Blue Orange Games
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 8
- Age range : 7+
- Mechanism(s):
- BGG Geek Rating: 10 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 5.0.
- More articles about Scatter Brain.
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