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Guest Review by: Justin Lowmaster

I’ve recently become a fan of Revensburger games. Make ‘n Break is a good edition to the set of games we already have, such as Castles of Burgundy and Seeland.

Make ‘n Break is a puzzle game where you have a card with a design that you build with the blocks included with the game. The timer starts, you draw a card, and build as fast as you can to complete as many cards before time runs out.

The cards show easy to difficult designs that are either colored to match the bricks or are without color. If you get a later type of card you can use any brick to build the design, otherwise your structure must match the colors. They also have designations so you can make an easier and a harder pile. This is useful if playing with less experienced players (probably kids) to level the playing field. This worked well when we played with my four-year old.

The bricks, or building blocks, are sturdy and of good quality.

Before you are done, each other player has a right to object if they feel you didn’t get it right. There is a lot of room for house rules here. If you see an error, do you wait until the builder is done, or tell them right away? On one of my rounds, I had an easy fix, but started knocking it down prematurely, and had to rebuild it when it was noted that I had two blocks swapped (it was a color matching card.) There is also no penalty to a player who says the structure is wrong when it is right, perhaps to slow you down. Again, house rules are good here. I would hope this wouldn’t be an issue with this game, though, as it is a test of yourself, and not a game of trying to mess up the other players.

The only thing I didn’t like about the game is the tokens they use for score keeping. They come in values of 1 and 10. I would prefer they came in 1 and 5. It would make for a less chaotic stack of point tokens and easier trading when you have enough for a larger token.

The tokens, however, have nice holders in the box, so if you don’t ‘follow the rules’ and put them in the center of the table, and keep them in the box, this makes the whole situation better. The box on a whole, as well, contains everything nicely.

I had a lot of fun with this game. It is fast paced, simple to learn, and provides a challenge. It is fun for young and old alike, and provides fun practice for cognitive and motor skills. It makes a great filler game too to add to your game collection.

Overall, it’s a  game the whole family can play and enjoy, it heelps reinforce logical and spatial reasoning, simple rules make it easy to learn right out of the box, multiple difficulty levels let kids improve building skills at their own pace, and it has a excellent replay value.

If you are interested in purchasing Ravensburger Make ‘N’ Break – Family Game, you can buy it on Amazon.com for about $20.00 and right now it’s free to ship.