Use examples from everyday life, from nature to pop culture, or materials and moods. Everyone around the table gets a turn to give cues and guess. The better your hints or guesses, the more points you earn. Play off others' experiences to narrow down what they have in mind! 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! After this second pass, the cue-giver places the scoring frame on the board so that the target color is in the center of the scoring frame and players score points. An exact guess is 3 points! Most of our game plays have been with 4 or 5 players. But the game has enough color cones for 10 players to join in. And once we get past this COVID era, we’ll give it a shot with 10. Plenty of color cards. The one area where we’ve deviated from the game rules is having all players draw cards at the outset. Since the tough part (and most time-consuming part) of the game is coming up with the cues. By letting players have a card in hand long before their turns, they can be thinking of their potential cues before their turn comes. And that’s helped the games flow more smoothly.

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When we first opened the game, read the rules, and sat down to play, we thought it sounded super simple. In fact, when playing with that group we don’t stop with just being the cue-giver twice. We just keep going until our lunch break is over.We have yet to play with players who are colorblind, so we don’t know what they’ll think of the game. But we could only imagine it would be tough.

Hues and Cues | Board Games | Zatu Games UK Hues and Cues | Board Games | Zatu Games UK

Because then I had a chance to give another cue — up to two words to help zero them in on the right space. It could be as simple as saying “cut open”, “pre-cut”, “guacamole”, or changing it up and going a different route like “Douglas fir”. Oh, so close! We really like that the scoring frame has numbers printed on the edges so you can easily remember how many points you get for being inside vs adjacent outside the walls.But then I drew my first card, chose a color I thought would work well, and then looked at the board and my mind went haywire.