Wouter & Ymke 
Board games come in all shapes and sizes, from sprawling strategy epics to tiny boxes packed with surprises. Colomo falls into the latter category. It’s an unassuming little game originally released in 2004 by Steffen Spiele, a publisher known for their love of abstract wooden games that focus on clever mechanics rather than flashy components. The company was recently taken over by Helvetiq, and now Colomo is getting another shot at the spotlight.
👥 2-6 players, ages 5+
⌛ Playing time: 5-30 minutes
📝 Designer: Steffen Mühlhäuser
🏢 Publisher: Helvetiq (review copy provided)
So what’s the deal with this game? Well, Colomo isn’t just one game. It’s actually six different games, all squeezed into a small box filled with colorful wooden discs. The difficulty ramps up as you go, making it suitable for both young kids and adults who think they have a good memory. Spoiler: they probably don’t.
Inside the box, you’ll find 60 wooden discs in six bright colors, plus a single die. That’s it. No board, no cards, no tiny plastic pieces that will inevitably disappear under the couch. Just pure, abstract gameplay, where memory is your greatest weapon. Or your biggest weakness.
Gameplay Overview – Can You Keep Track?
The six games in Colomo start off easy, then get trickier as you go. They all revolve around memory and color recognition, but each one has its own way of messing with your head. Here’s a look at three of them.
The simplest game in the box is Favourite Colours, which is perfect for small kids or anyone who needs a warm-up round. At the start of the game, each player gets a secret color, and their goal is to find all ten matching discs. On your turn, you flip two discs. If they both match your color, you keep them. If they don’t, you flip them back and try to remember where they are for later. First person to collect all ten of their color wins.
This game is as easy as it sounds, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to win. Young kids tend to dominate this one, and if you’ve ever played a memory game against a five-year-old, you probably already know where this is going.
Things get a little more interesting in Rainbow. Instead of looking for a single color, players try to collect one disc of each color without picking up any duplicates. On your turn, you flip over two discs. If they’re different colors, you have to flip a third. If that’s also a different color, you keep going. But the moment you reveal a duplicate, both matching discs get flipped back to their black side, and your turn ends.
The goal is to complete a full rainbow of six different colors. Once a complete set is formed, the discs are divided between the players who contributed to building it. When all the discs are claimed, the player with the most wins.
This one turns into a real memory battle as players start tracking colors and figuring out where to flip next. It might seem straightforward at first, but once colors start repeating and players compete for the final missing pieces of their rainbow, it gets surprisingly tense.
Then there’s Blackout, which takes things to a different level. Each player starts with one disc of each color, and one player is chosen as the Shifter. The Shifter lays all their discs out face-up while everyone else (the Seekers) gets twenty seconds to memorize their positions. Then the Shifter flips all the discs face-down and secretly swaps the positions of two of them.
Now the Seekers have to figure out where a specific color is. On their turn, a Seeker asks another player for a certain color. That player points to a disc and flips it over. If the color is correct, the Seeker gets to keep it. If it’s wrong, the Shifter keeps the disc instead. The round continues until five discs have been taken, and then the next player becomes the Shifter. The game ends once everyone has had a turn, and whoever has the most discs at the end wins.
This one really messes with your memory. It’s not just about remembering where things were, but also tracking the small swaps made by the Shifter. You think you’ve got it all figured out, until you confidently point at a disc and realize you had it completely wrong.
And that’s just three of the six games. Each one builds on the mechanics of the last, making Colomo feel like a mini memory-training boot camp.
Our Thoughts – A Memory Workout in a Box
Colomo is one of those games that sounds simple on paper but turns out to be surprisingly tricky. The games start off easy, which makes them great for younger kids, but by the time you get to the more advanced ones, you’ll realize you’re working way harder than expected just to remember where a few colors are hiding.
The best part? The whole thing is quick to learn and play. Each game lasts between ten and twenty minutes, which makes it great as a warm-up or cool-down for a game night. The mechanics are easy to grasp, but they offer just enough challenge to keep things interesting.
That said, every game in the box is based on memory. If memory games aren’t your thing, you’re probably going to struggle here. Some of the games also feel a little similar, since they all rely on remembering colors in different ways. But if you like the idea of testing your brain against your friends and family, there’s a lot of fun to be had.
And if you’re playing with kids, be prepared. They will absolutely destroy you. Again and again.
Colomo is the kind of game that sneaks up on you. It seems light and simple at first, but by the end, you’ll be completely focused, trying to outsmart your own forgetfulness. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll get through a round without a child beating you. But don’t count on it.
📝 We received a copy of the game from the publisher, Helvetiq.
