I’ve always had a soft spot for puzzle games. From Tetris to those logic puzzles you find in the Penny Press game books, to word games and Sudoku puzzles. I love the moment when I sit down in front of one, utterly clueless, then start teasing at the edges, working the system to slowly unravel the answer.

That’s the feeling I had the first time I encountered Turing Machine, designed by Fabien Gridel and Yoann Levet, with art by Sébastien Bizos and published by Scorpion Masqué in 2022. Turing Machine is a deduction puzzle for one to four players where the goal is to determine a secret three-number code. In theory, it sounds simple enough: Each number has a colour (blue, yellow, and purple), and each one is between one and five. You’re just trying to deduce the correct combination. But the way the game gets you there is what makes it fascinating.

In the centre of the table are a number of “verifiers,” small logical rules that help guide you toward the solution. Each verifier has a large confirmation card associated with it, and these confirmation cards combined with the punch board numbers act like a kind of cardboard computer. During a round, each player chooses a potential code consisting of three numbers between one and five, one number for blue, one for yellow, and one for purple. You take the punch cards corresponding to those numbers and stack them together, lining them up so that all the cut-out holes overlap. Once the cards are stacked, only a single square remains visible. You then take that assembled code and test it against one of the verifiers by placing the large confirmation card underneath. It will reveal either a check mark or an X, telling you whether your code satisfies the condition being tested or not. It’s a simple action mechanically, but the first time you a little green check mark, it’s a little startling, like watching a mechanical calculator click and clack to arrive at the right answer.

There are a lot of these logical verifiers in the box, forty-eight in total, but you only use four to six of them in any given puzzle. Each verifier tests a different logical condition, and collectively they provide all the information you need to narrow down the possible solutions. One example, a verifier might test the value of the yellow number in relation to three. In that case, the rule could be one of three possibilities: the yellow number is less than three, the yellow number is equal to three, or the yellow number is greater than three. If you test a code where yellow is one and the verifier returns a check mark, then you immediately know that the verifier rule must be “yellow is less than three.” It doesn’t tell you the exact number, you still don’t know whether yellow is one or two, but it eliminates several possibilities for the yellow number at once. The puzzle, then, becomes a process of gathering small pieces of information from multiple verifiers and slowly collating them until the three-number code reveals itself.

What makes Turing Machine particularly impressive is the sheer scale of what it’s capable of generating. The game’s website boasts over seven million possible puzzles, and you can go there at any time to generate a daily challenge or create puzzles of varying difficulty. The site will simply give you the verifiers you need and the corresponding answer cards, and from there you can assemble the puzzle on your table and start deducing. Easy puzzles might use four verifiers, while harder ones ramp up to five or six, each additional rule adding another layer of complexity to untangle or another step in the logic you’ll need to take to deduce the correct 3 numbers. It’s a clever system that keeps the game feeling fresh long after you’ve understood its basic structure.

I really have to say how much I appreciate the math and artistry that went into designing this thing. The fact that this little stack of punch cards and a set of cardboard verification strips can function like a logical computer boggles my mind a little. You lay these punch cards on top of each other, isolating a single square, and somehow that physical arrangement accurately reflects the numbers you’re testing against the rule. It’s the kind of design that feels elegant in a way that’s hard to fully articulate. There’s no denying how brilliance it is, and every time I hold an answer card up to my stack of punch cards, I find myself admiring how such a simple set of components can produce such a robust deduction system.

Where the experience starts to lose me, though, is in how the game handles multiplayer. On paper, Turing Machine supports up to four players, but the structure of the game makes that feel a little misleading. In each round, every player selects their own three-number code and can test it against up to three verifiers. After that, everyone gives either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Thumbs down if you want to keep gathering information, thumbs up if you believe you’ve solved the code. If everyone gives a thumbs down, the game simply continues into another round where all players test new codes. When one or more players signal that they think they’ve solved it, they can attempt to validate their answer against the solution. If they’re correct, they win; if they’re wrong, they’re eliminated from the game. If multiple players solve it in the same round, the winner is whoever asked the fewest verification questions in total.

Mechanically it works fine, but the effect is that the game feels extremely solitary. Yes, technically you’re racing the other players to reach the answer first, but the reality is that everyone is just solving their own puzzle in parallel. What your opponents do doesn’t really give you any additional information, and there’s no meaningful way to interact with their deductions or build on their discoveries. You’re not debating theories, you’re not negotiating clues, and you’re not influencing each other’s decisions in any meaningful way. At the table it ends up feeling less like a shared experience and more like several people sitting beside each other working through separate logic puzzles. At that point it almost feels like you might as well be doing Sudoku puzzle side by side and just comparing how long it took for each of you to finish.

None of this changes the fact that I genuinely admire what Turing Machine accomplishes as a design. As a solo puzzle, it’s pretty cool. There’s something really calm and satisfying about sitting down with a cup of coffee in the morning and working through one of its logical challenges, kind of like my mom used to do with her Penny Press puzzle books. The system and production itself is clever enough that the act of solving the puzzle becomes its own reward. It’s satisfying to look at all the verifiers and puzzle out the most efficient way to whittle down the potential options. The only practical drawback to Turing Machine is the physical setup. Pulling out the correct confirmation cards from a large stack, arranging six verifiers, and then carefully putting everything back in order afterward can feel a little tedious, especially if you’re planning to play multiple puzzles in a row. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it does add a small amount of friction to what is otherwise a very clean experience.

If you happen to be a premium subscriber to Board Game Arena, Turing Machine is available there in digital form. In that environment the game shines a little brighter, simply because all of that setup and sorting disappears. The system runs smoothly, the puzzles generate instantly, and you can focus entirely on the logic of the challenge rather than the logistics of the components. But in that case the magical moment of assembling the punch cards and having it reveal the answers is lost.

For me personally, though, I don’t see Turing Machine returning to my physical table very often. As a multiplayer experience it doesn’t give me the sense of interaction or shared triumph that I’m usually looking for when I sit down to play with friends. And while I appreciate the elegance of the puzzle, and the brilliance of the production, I’m not particularly drawn to playing it solo either with its tedious set up. What I’m left with, then, is a strong admiration for the wit and craftsmanship behind the design. It’s an incredibly cool system, one that manages to simulate a logical computer using nothing more than punched-out cardboard and a handful of clever rules, and perhaps a game I’ll spin up in my web browser while I’m eating my lunch. Even if Turing Machine is not a game I’ll reach for regularly, I can’t help but marvel what the designers managed to achieve with some piles of card stock.