Game Review - Morphology

It's our firm belief that games are a great way to develop your creative thinking.  So we were excited when we were asked to review a board game with creativity as the general premise.  Morphology.  We took up the challenge and put the game through it's paces.  Read on to see what we thought.

Morphology is the creation of Morphology Games and is described as "The hilarious guessing game where creativity wins!".

The aim of Morphology is that a team has to guess the word that their morphologist is trying to convey (provided to them on a card they pick from the deck).  To do this the morphologist can only use a set of game pieces (marbles, blocks, paddle pop sticks, string etc).  In this vein the game is similar to other games such as Pictionary and RapiDoh.  The implemenation is slightly different however and this does make for an engaging twist.  Whereas in other games you tend to have a single medium (pencil or dough etc) with which you can concoct almost anything you like, in Morphology you have a limited set of diverse pieces (and are often forced to work with a subset of these).  This limitation has the effect of forcing you to think differently about how you will approach the task.  Forcing you to be creative.  It's a nice touch and it works quite well.

I have played the game now with a few different groups of people and it has been universally enjoyed.  The rules are simple and easy to pick up which is great for a game of this nature.  If you're going to whip it out at a party you don't want to spend 1/2 an hour explaining the rules to people.  The game pieces are of good quality too which we liked.  During play we had the pieces thrown about and abused quite a bit so it's good to know they'll last.

It's quite interesting to observe peoples creativity and approaches when playing this game.  The morphologist often found that their original ideas didn't work and had to adapt or change tack completely.  Some people were frustrated by this while others happily jumped from angle to angle.  Similarly the other team members (the guessers) have a variety of inputs to consider including the current pieces being put together,  previous attempts, how the morphologist is reacting to their guesses etc.  Add to that a time restriction of 1 minute and you get some interesting outcomes.  We would often discuss how people arrived at guesses after the round and it was intriguing to dissect their thought processes.

If you're a creative person then you know that rules are inevitably made to be broken and with this game there is lots of possibility which is awesome for extending it's playability factor.  One thing we've considered is that prior to every game you should randomly remove a particular type of piece from play and also add another random object from what you have around you.  This way it becomes harder to fall into patterns in terms of the ways you use pieces to represent things.  Every word card also has both an easy and hard word on it.  Normally you decide which to play at the beginning of the game.  We've considered that you could roll a dice and even numbers mean you play the easy word and odd the hard.  Or another approach could be that easy words move you forward 1 spot but hard words offer you 2 spots (with a penalty of back 1 spot if your team doesn't guess it.).  Morphology is a lot of fun as is but be creative and I'm sure you'll find many other ways to extend the game.

While Morphology is primarily marketed as a board game to be played with family and friends I think it also has potential in education.  A teacher could, for intance, create their own set of words based on the topic they are currently studying and use that instead.  The pieces could be substituted with other objects specific to the topic as well.  This could be a fun way to revise as students would be forced to consider everything they have been learning as possibilities for the word being created.

Overall we have had a lot of fun playing Morphology.

If you're interested and would like to know more, check out ther website.

(I recieved a copy of Morphology to do this review but have not been payed otherwise.  All comments and thoughts are completely my own.)

You're on your way to becoming a Highly Creative Person.