We’ve been playing the original Dobble as a family for a couple of years now and always loved its simplicity and ability to provide a quick blast of family fun in almost any situation (we often take it to restaurants, camping, etc... to fill time). So, when we learned of Dobble Connect, we were excited and intrigued to see how it would be different and couldn’t wait to get started. The packaging is nice and comes with a well-illustrated instruction pamphlet to help you play (and boy will you need it, more on this later). The cards themselves are, on first glance very similar to those of the original Dobble which helps make it feel familiar. However, on closer inspection you soon see there are a number of differences, not least the fact there are now 90 different symbols to consider! The cards also now have a hexagonal shape and colour coding too, which both are important for the game. We set about reading the instructions as it was clearly more involved than regular Dobble and after several read throughs, decided to just start playing despite not fully having a grasp of the rules (we went with the age-old tried and tested method of learning as you play). It all started out well with the gameplay being similar to what we knew already, however it wasn’t long before uncertainty kicked in and we had to pause play in order to consult the rules on exactly how the cards should be passed around when someone gets a match. Unfortunately, the rules aren’t very clear here (a common theme throughout) and we ended up taking a best guess. Play continued and it wasn’t long before we again had to pause to check how many cards should be passed around when a player puts down someone else’s colour (again the rules aren’t clear on this so we made up our own rule so we could play on). There were a couple of other things that caused a similar process to occur, but you get the idea, the rules are simply not clear enough to play the game in an enjoyable way. The game has some good elements (blocking someone else’s row just as they’re about to get 4 is really satisfying and quite funny) and we did have fun but sadly didn’t instantly fall in love with it. I’d like to think we’ll give it another go but I feel we’ll probably always reach for the original Dobble game over this as its simplicity and resulting fun factor is a winning formula that’s hard to beat!