Morphology is similar to Win, Lose or Draw, Pictionary or Charades in that players are trying to guess a word. The difference here is that you don’t have to have any drawing or acting skills.  The Morphology games have won multiple awards since they were launched in 2009 including being #2 Toy of the Year from TIME Magazine’s Top Toys in 2010.

How to Play

Play is in teams and one person from the team draws a card with a word on it. They use some of the 50 pieces that come with the game to make a picture on the table that illustrates their word so the other person can guess. Sometimes you have to roll and you may end up with a twist such as building a word with your eyes closed or using your non-dominant hand. If your teammate gets the word right in the allotted time, your frog jumps to the next lily pad and it’s the other teams turn.

The Pieces

So what are these 50 pieces? There is a string, a barrel bead, a few rings, stones, sticks, cubes and more.  You can see exactly what all is included (including the frogs, timer and dice) and more on how to play on the Morphology Website. The image below shows the cards too, the black words are easy, the grey words are hard.

Our Creations

Can you guess what these are pictures of? I’m not telling until some people have guessed in the comments!

Our Game Experience

What’s fun is that you can move the pieces a bit too, as long as you are the puppeteer (you move the pieces), not an actor (you can interact with the pieces yourself.) The instructions explain it with an example. You can’ rock one of the pieces like a baby, but you can make one piece rock another piece as a baby.

We tried the game out during one of our Games nights. My friend Cathie mentioned she is really bad at Charades but she did as well as the rest of us with Morphology!  She also mentioned one of her daughters dislikes playing Charades. I think this is a much better idea for a party or get together if you have some people in your midst that are too shy to act something out in front of everyone.

Our only suggestion for how the game could be better is that the string is too stiff. It should have been more like a typical shoelace. We had trouble getting it to stay in the shape we put it in.

Morphology Junior – for Children

There is also a children’s version, Morphology Junior for ages 8 and up. Either game might be too hard for younger children just because of the particular clues there are, but I would like to play informally with my girls (ages 5 and 6) and let them pick their own word and see if I can guess.

Where To Find Morphology

The games are sold at Barnes & Noble, Marbles, Books a Million, Indigo, Scholar’s Choice and online. Morphology retails for $24.99 and Morphology Junior retails for $29.99.

– Don’t Forget to Leave Your Guess for the Two Creations In This Post in the Comments!

*Disclosure: I received the product(s) mentioned above free of charge by the company or PR representative for evaluation purposes. No other compensation was provided. See my Disclosure Policy for more information.