It may have a dubious title and look like a particularly silly dexterity game for children but Helvetiq's Oh My Ring! is a remarkably challenging manipulation and memory game where the 2-4 players are racing to win cards by being the first to match the arrangement of coloured rings shown on the card. The game is designed by Olivier Mahy.
Open up the chunky cuboid box and you'll see that the game comprises a bag of large brightly coloured plastic rings and a deck of cards. There are eight rings in each colour (red, yellow, blue and green). They are very chunky, with a diameter of almost 3 cm, so they will be oversized on even the pudgiest of fingers; indeed, it's the large size of the rings that makes this game actually quite difficult for children to play, even once they've mastered the art of distinguishing their left hand from their right. The cards show variously a right hand, left hand or both hands with up to eight of the rings distributed in a particular pattern on the fingers displayed. All you have to do to win the card is to be the first to precisely replicate that pattern using the eight rings (two of each colour) with which you start the game.
Of course there are restrictions. For starters, you can't just remove a ring with one hand to relocate it; you can only reposition a ring by touching the fingers of your other hand and letting a ring slide across. This means that the solution to some cards will likely involve some Tower of Hanoi-style manipulation. The basic game then is very reminiscent of Dr Eureka (Blue Orange) but with your fingers and the rings replacing Dr Eureka's test tubes and balls.
However, there's more. The reverse of each card shows a specific restriction, and to spice the game up you resolve each card applying the restriction on the card on top of the draw deck. There are seven different restrictions, including some that actually alter the target you are trying to achieve: Mirror requires players to recreate the pattern on the opposite hand(s) to what's shown on the card, Shift requires all the rings to be transposed one finger to the left or right, Reverse changes the order for the rings on each finger (so if the card shows them in the order red, yellow, blue on the middle finger, you need to place them blue, yellow, red), and 3 Colors replicates the pattern on the card but with one of the four colours removed. Other restrictions make things more difficult in other ways: Memory requires the card to be covered up once everyone has looked at it, Under the Table keeps the target card in view but requires the players to manipulate the rings without looking at their hands, and Out Loud adds a degree of distracting chaos by requiring players to call out the colour of each ring when they touch it.
As you might guess, the various changing restrictions add a certain mental agility to the physical dexterity demanded by Oh My Ring! Tho' this game has a party game vibe and may attract superficial comparisons with DroPolter (Oink Games), you'll find Oh My Ring! is altogether more challenging and nowhere near as easy as it looks!