Designer: Fabien Gridel, Yoann Levet
Publisher: Le Scorpion Masqué
Turing Machine takes players back to the classic age of punch card computers. Here’s the challenge of this deduction game: you need to crack a three-digit password, but only the computer knows the answer. Using Verifier Cards, you can try to guess and check potential passwords, but until you know what the Verifier Card actually checks, you might have more trouble than you expected. First to crack the code wins!
While Turing Machine is a novel game, the Committee found that Le Scorpion Masqué elevated this title with an extremely compelling physical experience. Players physically get to assemble a set of three cards to make the password, and then place them over another card to check to see if their guess matches the current Verifier. It’s clever and quick, allowing players to play against an analog computer to check their results. Plus, the website boasts another seven million potential game combinations, so suffice it to say, we plan to keep this in our collections for a while yet.
What Our Committee Is Saying
Turing Machine accomplishes something truly engaging – the pure logic and deduction puzzle it presents will let you flex your reasoning skills against both the machine and your fellow codebreakers. The race element encourages you to make deductive leaps and to ask questions to get as much info as you can in your precious few turns before someone else manages to crack the code, and the physical punch card design is fantastically evocative of codebreaking computers of old.
Jessica Fisher
Something about the physicality of the game is just super appealing to me, first off, but more generally, I think the puzzle laid out by the game is extremely satisfying. The punch card system for generating information is genius, and it elevates the game to a fun, tactile experience rather than just a bunch of mathy lookup tables. … I absolutely loved it.
Eric Yurko
Photos courtesy of What’s Eric Playing?. All rights reserved.
The American Tabletop Awards 