Review of Confusion
Imagine you are walking into a gaming session observing the following actions: one player rolls three dice. ALmost the same instant the entire turns crazy: one player throws a card in the middle of the table and yells Bluuuuuueeeee, another one raises his arms, a third one does the same and screams Woooooow and another player drums on the table with just two fingers. Some mumbling follows. A few chips get distributed and the three dice are rolled again. Now everyone is clapping their hands like crazy and someone shouts: Peter, you were last!! Some chips get distributed and the irritating specatacle starts all over again.
Welcome to Confusion! Confusion is a pattern recognition game with three dice. The little scene from above shows how confusing it might get at times. The reason is that each die has a different meaning. The color die defines the color - either blue, red or yellow are possible. The second die is the word die. The word die also bears the same background colors, but each side has a word printed on it, e.g. the word Blue (blau) is printed on one side that is colored in red. Due to the different perceptions between color and word the brain will get confused.
If the color on the color-die and the word on the word-die do not match (e.g. yellow color and the word blue written on yellow background) you have to throw one card from your hand into the middle. As you might have guessed each player's hand consists of three cards, one in each color. The card that needs to be put into the middle of the table needs to bear the missing color while each player also has to say/shout/yell the name of that particular color. A thing most easily forgotten, once you have figured out which color is the right one to be played.
The third die is the action die. This one only comes into play if the color on the color die (e.g. blue) and the word on the word die (e.g. red on a background in yellow color) do match. In this case, each side of the action die requires a different action (e.g. clapping your hands, raising both arms without shouting "Wow" or saying "Psssst").
This logic can be very confusing and will probably lead to rather different opinions about the "right" action in this particular turn. An additional comment: do try this game at home -- as playing this game in a public place will probably result in several people thinking: are these people out of their minds?!
Wherever you play the game, each player performing the right action scores a victory point. The player with 9 victory points wins the game. The full game rules also offer additional variations which basically change the logics of which action needs to be executed when.Nothing complicated, but it is just mooore confusing.
Naturelich my opinion
Confusion is a small filler that's good for 2-5 players. It works better with 3 players and up. The official playing time is said to be 20 minutes but no game ever took that long. It was fun for three games in a row. After a few plays the game becomes boring and repetitive pretty quickly. Until then, however, it is a lot of fun and very confusing at times. Especially if each player takes a different action after the dice roll. It can be hectic at times and is entertaining for this short period where it's fresh and new. I would recommend the game only for someone who is playing frequently with changing groups. For kids, the game might be a bit more challenging. In addition, the game probably helps kids in recognizing patterns. Therefore Confusion which might be a good eductational tool (e..g in school class) but I am really not the right person to judge this.
An additional note for non-German speakers: the colors on the word die are in German language, so you have to learn the words Gelb (yellow), Rot (red) and Blau (blue). This might be another reason not to buy the game...