Rainbow Go!
- Board's Eye View
- Apr 17
- 2 min read
Published by Professor Puzzle, Rainbow Go! is an attractively presented trivia team game for a minimum of three players but it's at its best as a team game for up to eight players (four pairs in teams and a quizmaster). At a push, you could include more players by adding a third player to one or more of the teams, or even adding another team.
The rules are intuitively simple, so this is a game that you can break out with any group and immediately be up and running. The quizmaster takes out a card which has seven clues to the single answer on the bottom of the card. They read out the clues in descending order, pausing briefly after each clue to give the other players a chance to have a crack at the answer. Guess correctly and you win the card and it'll be worth the number of points (1-7) that corresponds to the point at which the answer was given: guess correctly on the first clue and your team scores 7 points but the points value drops by one for each clue given. The rainbow element is that seven clues on each card are coloured in line with the seven colours of the rainbow, so the clues go from red to violet.
Each team ordinarily gets just one guess per card - so you don't want to guess recklessly because that will lock you out from guessing again after more clues have been revealed. That said, each team has a 'go again' card they can play to give them a second run at the card. The rules have these as single use (ie: once only per game) but you could easily house rule a more relaxed policy.
The idea of the score reducing with each additional clue will be familiar to most players because they'll probably have seen a similar mechanic in a TV quiz show. Players may instinctively want to guess immediately on the first clue but that will inevitably be a completely wild guess. Typically, the clues only really begin to home in on a single answer by the third clue (so when the card is worth 5 points). For example, a card has the red 7-point clue 'Fictional character' and the orange 6-point clue 'Charles Dickens'; it's only the third clue 'Born in a workhouse' that narrows the answer down to Oliver Twist.
Professor Puzzle have put together an appealing package. The distinctive rainbow-shaped box includes four rainbow colour score cards for the up-to-four competing teams and a generous stack of around 150 double-sided clue cards, so there's ample play value in the box and not too many are dependent on any specialised as opposed to general knowledge. It's also a game that's not going to overstay its welcome: the rules suggest playing over just 10 rounds (ie: 10 question cards); so you can expect games to take no more than around 20 minutes.
