Happy Puzzle Company – The Genius Square Review

Reviewed by Melody

The Happy Puzzle Company is a small company who specialise in selling games, puzzles, challenges and puzzle books, they have over 300 to choose from and many have won awards. Their ethos is to promote family play and to develop thinking skills.

I have seen adverts for the Happy Puzzle Company previously but have never played any of their games so I was delighted to be asked to review The Genius Square.

The Genius Square is one of a range of games from “The Genius Collection”. These are billed as being possibly the cleverest games ever invented. The Genius Square is actually the original “genius” game and has sold over 1.2 million copies worldwide. It has also won multiple-awards. It has a “genius rating” of 3 out of a possible 5 lightbulbs.

The Genius Square is for ages 6 years + and is for 1-2 players.

I was impressed with the communication from the Happy Puzzle Company. I had an email to tell me that the game had been dispatched, and then another, a couple of days, later confirming the time that the courier would deliver it. When the package arrived, I was surprised at how small the box was (it measures 19cm x 19cm). It turns out that this was because packaging had been kept to a minimum and there was no unnecessary plastic. The game fitted the box pretty much perfectly. This is also a positive as it means it doesn’t take up too much room in our (already overflowing) games cupboard.

Inside the box were two plastic grids, two sets of nine multi-coloured wooden shapes, two sets of wooden blocker pegs and a small resealable plastic bag containing seven dice. There was also an instruction booklet, which had instructions in many languages. I was impressed by the quality of the pieces which felt very sturdy.

The aim of the game is to complete the square by placing all of the coloured pieces into the empty squares, fitting them around the wooden blocker pegs. The positions of these pegs are determined by throwing the dice, and placing the pegs in the corresponding spaces on the grid. A bit like Tetris! You can play alone or by racing against an opponent to be the first to complete the square.

We had a lot of fun playing the Genius Square, both of my children (aged 8 and 11) were fully engaged with the game and played very nicely without any arguments (quite an unusual occurrence in our household!). We found ourselves becoming quite competitive to see who could complete each puzzle the fastest. I also liked the fact that the Genius Square supports STEM learning, players use several skills including thinking at speed, spatial awareness and visual perception to complete the puzzle. On the whole the game was very quick, taking a couple of minutes each round, but sometimes the combination of pegs was more difficult and it took longer to solve. The box says that there are 62,208 possible puzzles and that there is always at least one solution (apparently this has been checked by a computer programme) so this is a game that will never get boring.

The only downside for us was that only two of us could play at a time and we all wanted to play against each other. We are seriously considering purchasing a second game so that we have four sets of playing pieces!

Overall this is a brilliant game, I would highly recommend it. It’s compact, good quality and great fun.

Rating: 5/5

RRP: £19.99

This product can be purchased from The Happy Puzzle Company here.