Hues and Cues

One of my favourite blogging teams from SAHM Reviews has made their OWN game called Hues and Cues.

Hues and Cues

Disclosure: We received a copy of this game in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links.

Game Description:

What hue do you think of when we say “apple”? Hues and Cues is a vibrant game of colorful communication where players are challenged to make connections to colors with words. Using only one and two-word cues, players try to get others to guess a specific hue from the 480 colors on the game board. The closer the guesses are to the target, the more points you earn. Since everyone imagines colors differently, connecting colors and clues has never been this much fun!
Ages 8+ | 3-10 Players | 30+ Minute Game Play | MSRP $24.99

This is SUCH a fun game. The board looks like one of those colour pickers from paint programs where you pick exactly which type of green you want.

How to Play

When it’s your turn, you pick a card. Each card has 4 colours on it with codes such as H4, C18 OR J20 to identify which specific hue it is.

So you have one of those cards and you get to pick which hue you want to go with. Let’s say I went with the card on the right. I decided to do B9. I don’t tell anyone the letter/number code.

What I do is tell them a ONE-WORD cue that makes sense to me with that colour. You can’t say regular colour names like red, blue etc. You can however say colour names like lavender, maroon, or chartreuse. You cannot point to something in the room but you can say something that is often that colour. I might say: apple, Christmas, licorice, tomato etc.

Then going clockwise, the other players place one of their tokens on the board where they thing the right hue is. Then the cue-giver gives a TWO-WORD clue (although they can use another one word if they can’t think of any.) For my colour I might say, Christmas decorations (if you didn’t already say Christmas) or pomegranate fruit. Then going counter-clockwise this time, the other players place another piece on the board where they think the hue is this time.

Then the cue-giver reveals the actual colour using the scoring square. You place it so that the colour your picked is in the very middle of the square. Please note the example below is from a different colour that was picked.

In the above image, L7 was the colour that was picked and given cues about.

Scoring

Scoring is as follows. The person who guessed the correct colour gets 3 points (in this case nobody). Anyone IN the square gets 2 points (in the above case, the pink token. Anyone directly outside the square that is in a square touching the scoring square (including diagonally) gets 1 point. In the example above, the yellow token. Finally, the cue-giver gets 1 point for every token IN the square. In this case, 1 point.

You use the grey part of the board for scoring. Each player has three tokens. Two of them are used for picking hues on the board. The other is used for keeping score as shown below.

Points to Consider

The game is great fun but we noticed a few things we wanted to mention in the review.

• The game will not work well if any player is colour blind OR has bad eye sight. There are plenty of other games that can be played with bad eye sight, but this isn’t one of them.
• You must have GOOD lighting in the room you play this in. We played it in a room that doesn’t have an overhead light and we started with the front door and window open for light. But as night came it got darker and by the end of the game we needed to hold our phone flashlight over the board to try to see the nuances between hues.
• The game says ages 8+ but our 6 year old played. She only needed help with placing the scoring square. She did a pretty good job thinking of cues. Once she had to ask her dad for help (who wasn’t playing.)
• The cue-giver gets points for those who are in the square so you are trying to help them guess, not throw them off track. However sometimes it’s fun to give a more vague clue. Even apple could be three different colours let alone the different hues. We also had the clue “Neon” which has many options.
• Thinking up cues was actually harder than we though. In the example I originally gave above of the red colour, you have to think of what is that specific HUE of red. Sometimes that is hard.

Buy Hues and Cues

You can buy Hues and Cues directly from The Op (Usaopoly)

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