Turing Machine Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Turing Machine, a puzzly deduction game published by Scorpion Masque. In Turing Machine, player are trying to be the first to decipher the puzzle.

In 1939 mathematician Alan Turing invented a hypothetical machine that would come to be considered an early model of the modern computer. In 2022 games publisher Scorpion Masqué brought us the board game interpretation of Turing’s invention. Immediately a hit, the game has remained popular, impressing coders and math lovers around the world. I may be a little late to the party, but I finally had the opportunity to check the game out for myself, and here’s what I thought.

Turing Machine is a numbers deduction game for 1-4 aspiring mathematicians, and is playable in about 20 minutes.

To set up a game of Turing Machine, players can choose from a list of puzzles in the rule book, sorted by difficulty. Alternatively, there is a website that will generate a puzzle for them based on their preferences. The cards indicated for the chosen puzzle are then taken from their respective decks and placed in a wheel-like formation surrounding a central “machine tile”: first, a number of criteria cards specified by the puzzle are placed, then their associated verification cards.

To play the game, each player will simultaneously compose their proposal, a sequence of three numbers 1-5, in three different colors—blue, yellow, and purple—by overlapping three punch cards. Once each player has completed their proposal, they can question up to three verifiers. This is done by laying the three punch cards over the verifier in such a way that either a checkmark or “x” will be revealed, indicating whether the card meets the criteria or not. Each verifier has a specific criteria card associated with it; for example, a criteria card might say “blue is equal to 1 or blue is greater than 1.” So if the proposal uses a blue 1 and the verifier shows a check mark, you know blue is a 1.

In following rounds players may compose new proposals based