Deflexion Again

I played Deflexion again with Garrett on Saturday.

As you may or may not recall from past posts, Garrett likes chess and checkers (but mostly chess) and has demonstrated an uncanny ability to pick up on chess variants such as Proteus (which he likes) and Knightmare Chess (which he doesn't). So the grid board of DEFLEXION was rather easy for him to pick up visually.



Deflexion is fairly easy to teach to even a pretty young kid like Gar (age 7) because there are far fewer moves to make and they are all standardized. There are also far fewer pieces. You can move each piece one square in ANY direction, or rotate it a quarter turn. There's a two-sided mirror piece called a "djed" that can swap places with a pyramid as well. That's about it.

I basically went over the rules with Garrett once, then pointed to each piece and asked "What can this piece do? What can that piece do?" etc, and was sure he had picked it up right the first time.

DELFEXION is so simple that it may not seem like much of a game, but the elegant beauty of the game becomes very apparent in the last phase of every turn: turning on the lasers. This is the "Oh, Gee Whiz!" element that will have both kids and adults hooked on this game. If the laser "paints" a non reflective piece or the non-reflective side of a piece, that piece is captured. Simple as that.

I'm proud to say that Garrett understood the strategy immediately, and kicked his hapless father's butt in no time flat. And that's not just hyperbolic praise.. I could see him figuring it out in his own head without being too obvious about it. We played three games, he won two handily and I won one not quite so handily. The game starts with the laser "painting" the wall of the tray, which is a safe shot. I fell for his trick of setting up the shot at the Pharoah while not moving pieces to ruin "the safe shot".. it drew me off of what was happening while *I* was trying to set up a little razzle dazzle my own self. Clever little brat!

DEFLEXION gets high marks from me as a family game and creative thinking game. I hope to see more from this company.