14 April 2025
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Dobble meets Connect 4 in a new version of the super popular game, but is it worth your time? Our reviewer isn't so sure...
Written by Chris Lowry
You’ve played Dobble, right? It is an incredibly simple game; a circular card is covered in symbols, and you need to find the matching symbol on your own card. There is always exactly one match between each card, yet it can feel utterly impossible—until you see the match, hidden in plain sight the whole time. Different variants involve collecting all the cards, or competing piles, or stealing from others. It’s fast, it’s fun, and as the youth leader of two different youth groups, I’ve probably played it 10,000 times.
In fact, looking at my shelves it turns out, for some reason, I actually own three copies of Dobble—so I’m obviously the perfect target market for Dobble Connect. It’s just a shame that it’s… not very good. At best it’s unnecessary, at worst it’s broken. The addition to the familiar original is the “Connect”; they’ve borrowed the mechanic from Connect Four (although without much of its spirit). As individuals or in teams, you are now aiming to place down four of your team’s cards in a straight line.
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Dobble Connect – Dobble Meets Connect Four
Sounds fun, I know. The problem is that Connect Four’s heart is the planning, the deception and the limited placement options. In Dobble Connect, you can either invest your energy trying to block your opponents, or you can put it into making four of your own. You are already working as fast as you can and, in our testing, it was always better to put all team brains into connecting the team four rather than blocking others. It was better 100% of the time. So the strategy of Connect Four? The blocking, tricking play? Absent. And the interaction of Dobble, with every opponent looking at the same card and matching it before them with a savage swipe? Also absent.
There are some slight attempts to mix things up with different coloured cards polluting your hand; but this provides very little change to the overall composition of your deck. The winner of Dobble Connect will be the team who is best at playing Dobble.
Dobble Connect does have a completely new set of symbols compared to the original, and with ten per card rather than eight. This makes the game a little slower and a little more challenging… and more frustrating. Even those new icons seemed somehow a little less exciting than the normal, with less variety in size than the normal game. There’s a threshold between fun and fatigue that Dobble manages to stride perfectly, and that Connect accidentally trips over.
It may sound like I’m being unfair here; let me tell you one gaming group experience. We brought out Dobble Connect to a group of adults that had never played Dobble. They played Connect a couple of times, and although they found aspects of it entertaining, overall they were not particularly enthused. We then pulled out Dobble, and the group played it over and over again for more than an hour, laughing and shouting and then setting up another round, whilst the Dobble Connect box lay abandoned at the side of the table.
It’s not always clear what the special sauce is that turns a good game into a great one; but whatever it is, Dobble Connect has the opposite.
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Verdict: Dobble Connect
We wouldn't recommend this. It’s worse than Dobble. I quite like Dobble, as a gentle warm-up game, but I can’t see why anyone would want to scratch that itch with the inferior experience of Dobble Connect instead.
During writing this review, I’ve written the word Dobble twenty-one times. That should be a clue. If you love Dobble and want more? Consider this. If you haven’t played Dobble, definitely play that first. If you don’t like Dobble at all? Do not play this.
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About Dobble Connect
Designer: Mathieu Aubert
Publisher: Zygomatic
Time: 5-15m
Players: 2-12
Ages: 6+
Price: £12
What’s in the box?
- 90 Cards
- Rulesheet