Crossed Wires: A frenzied race to answer the phone is a kids board game for two to four players by Jan and Tom Schoeps and published by Ravensburger.

The Crossed Wires board consists of a mass of spaghetti-like paths (wires) passing through six hexagonal cutouts and ending in six blob-shaped cutouts. Each of the cutouts is filled with a cardboard piece during game play. Each of the six hexagons has three wires crossing the piece in various path combinations. The six blobs are telephones in six colors. When all twelve cut-outs are full, there are six telephones connected in pairs by only three wires that take twisty, curvy paths through a variable number of the changeable hexagons.

Each player has a set of six cardboard sqares printed with telephones of each color. There are a bunch of gold "telephone chips" (coins) and a six-sided die with colored circles on each face, one for each color of the telephones.

On a player's turn, she rolls the die. All players then try to follow the path from the phone of the color on the die to another phone using only their eyes. When each player figures the other side, they slap down the token from their hand with the color of the phone they think is connected, face down in a stack. Once all players have added a piece, the player who rolled the die traces it carefully with a finger to determine the actual connected phone. The stack is flipped, revealing the first player's guess. If it is incorrect, the players precede down the stack until a correct color is found. The top player with the right answer wins a telephone chip. The player who won the chip selects two cut-out pieces from the board and swaps them -- either two phones or two wire-filled hexagons. The player to the left of the person who last rolled the die then rolls the die and the game continues. When a player collects six telephone chips, he wins the game.

In my estimation, it is always better to switch hexagons rather than telephones. You get to control more of the new board.

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