Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
During my meeting with Ares Games during Gen Con 2025, I was chatting with the leadership team about their fall releases. After getting an update on games like Perfect Mismatch and WunderWaffen, I began to make moves to my next meeting. Before I walked away, I was handed a small plastic baggie with some sheets of paper, a small deck of poker-sized cards, and a die that looked like it was ripped from a copy of Dice Realms with die faces that featured images of polyomino shapes.
Weird, I thought, but this does slip nicely into the front of my messenger bag.
At the time, I didn’t think anything of this, and added this supposed “game” to the pile of about 40 other titles I brought home from Indy. As I neared the finish of my coverage of the other games, I noticed that small baggie again, sticking out from behind the back of my Disney Lorcana review bag.
“What do we have here?” I muttered to myself. I pulled out the components: double-sided sheets with a 9×9 grid of boxes, shapes, letters and numbers…that red die with the Tetris die faces…and an instruction manual with the game’s title, TEDOKU. Three minutes later, I was playing.
It Rhymes With “Sudoku” For a Reason
TEDOKU is a puzzle game for at least one player, but can be played with any number of people as long as you have enough sheets from the game’s scorepad. Over the course of 20 turns, players will reveal a card, then roll a die, and use that combination of results to scratch out portions of the sheet. The grid of spaces includes nine large sectors of 3×3 spaces, each with a shape that looks a bit like a flower in silhouette, slightly grayed out but also pictured at the bottom of the shape to remind players of which image is where. Each column is a number, 1-9, and each row is a letter, A-I.
That means there are 27 different areas where the action will take place, but during setup, 7 of those cards are removed, face-down. The remaining 20 cards form a draw deck that dictate each turn’s terms: players have to scratch out the rolled symbol (think normal Tetris stuff, like the L, the four-block line, the T, etc.) with at least one of the scratched-out squares in the row, column or sector that was drawn on that turn. The shape that is drawn must completely fit, though; late in each game, that becomes a tricky proposition. After 20 turns, players score points based on the number of completely-filled rows, columns, and sectors. In solo play, it’s a high-score challenge that becomes addictive fast.
That’s because TEDOKU does the right things for a game of this weight: you can teach it to a child in about 60 seconds. The decisions are interesting, but quick. Solo play is so fast that I knocked out three plays in a half-hour. “Re-racking” the game is simple, and each game’s random approach to how the cards and the rolled shapes play out guarantees a slightly different game each time. (One of the D6 die faces is a wild, so you can draw any of the game’s five shapes if that is rolled.) And, there is an optional rule around bonus shapes that can be added to ease the difficulty of the base game.
I doubt that anyone will come away from TEDOKU pumping their fist that they have discovered the next all-time classic puzzler. But, as a simple-to-learn, difficult-to-master puzzle game, TEDOKU is pretty good. My high score is 19 points, and I was surprised that I kept playing simply to score one additional point. (The high-score chart indicates that 16-24 points makes you a “TEDOKU Champion”, but 24+ points makes you a “TEDOKU Black Belt.” Champion sounds better than Black Belt, but now I want to be a Black Belt!)
These sorts of quick, satisfying puzzlers are what I love to break out before a longer night of the heavy Euros that hit my table most often. So there will always be a place for games like TEDOKU. I’m not sure this is going to be on my shelf forever, but I will always be down for a game of TEDOKU as a side activity, especially solo.
TEDOKU details
- Designer: Sandro Blasich
- Artists: Matteo Ceresa
- Publishers: Ares Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 99
- Age range : 7+
- Time range : 10 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Dice Rolling, Die Icon Resolution, Paper-and-Pencil, Solo / Solitaire Game, Square Grid
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.6 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about TEDOKU.
