Dinosaur Island creators’ next game, Ctrl, has players building a colourful 3D cube from plastic blocks

Create a three-dimensional sculpture from cubes whilst blocking off rival colours in Ctrl, the next board game from the makers of Dinosaur Island.

Beginning with just a plain black cube, Ctrl sees players taking it in turns to place their individually-coloured pieces with the aim of dominating any visible space. The upcoming board game for two to four players has a scoring system that forces its players to think carefully about where to attach their cubes.

Each round sees players’ cubes scored based on how many angles - besides the bottom - that they can be successfully viewed from. For example, if one player’s blocks can be seen from the left and right, but not the back or front, then they score points for just those two angles. This mechanic is similar to one in board game Mental Blocks - also published by Pandasaurus - although in the case of that game, players are working together to solve a perspective-focused puzzle.

Flags can be placed on matching coloured blocks to prevent other players from building on top of those pieces, thereby securing the corresponding player points for that set of cubes. The winner of Ctrl is whoever has successfully scored the most points with their coloured cubes.

Ctrl is designed by Julio Nazario, who also has two other board games due to release this year: a horror board game called Haunted! and HOLI: Festival of Colors, a board game about making patterns.

The studio behind Ctrl is Pandasaurus Games, publisher of family board game Machi Koro and co-op board game The Mind. A sequel to The Mind, The Mind Extreme, is due to release in the UK on May 20th.

Ctrl is currently set to release on July 28th 2020 at a retail price of $24.95 (£19).