In my quest to find activities that will hold the interest of children with a five-year age gap, I routinely find myself playing board games that normally wouldn’t register more than a fraction of my attention. Blorp!, for example.

What is Blorp!, you ask? Apart from being a noise my offspring produce when they don’t want to empty the dishwasher or hang up their towels, a blorp is apparently the answer to what Dr. Seuss would animate for a David Cronenberg flick. These are queasy creatures in three colors that communicate by, uh, farting confetti at one another. Garth Kaufmann, who both designed and did the illustrating, sure has a knack for tongues, eyeballs, and tendrils, I’ll tell you that much.

Blorps are, um, they’re, like, these blobs that, um, they live in a briny solution and, uh

Blorp! is a tile-laying game. In the vein of many tile-laying games, it traces its DNA back at least to Carcassonne, with its mutable borders, emphasis on joining like-minded edges, and the need to complete one of the titular creatures in order to score it.

But the similarities end there, the byproduct of considerable mutation in the intervening generations. Perhaps foremost, Blorp! assigns each player their own arrangement of confetti-stuffed monsters. There’s no sharing blorps. Not that you’d want to.

Speaking broadly, your objective is to make very large blorps. One of each color, in fact. Completed blorps score a point per tile, but your largest blorps double that value. Which still doesn’t ensure that high of a tally, but keeps the kiddies in the running. Special tiles, such as floating spores, earn points when hemmed in on all sides, while trumpets and confetti…

Okay. Look. Trumpets and confetti might require some explanation.

Making a big blorp isn’t as easy as it sounds. Often, the only tiles available on the table will be better-suited to pinching off a blorp than pushing out an even bigger one. So you tie the knot, but where does that leave you? With a nuggety, low-scoring blorp, that’s where.

Blorps communicate via confetti trumpets.

Enter trumpets. By sticking these things into your blorps’, ahem, orifices, and then directing them to toodle in one another’s direction, you can expand its size even across the buoyant saline that is their substrate. In the image above, there are two red blorps that have merged into one through apocalyptic toodling, with a third that might join the bacchanal if only it gets finished in time.

That isn’t all of it. Some tiles show puffs of confetti. Trumpets can re-route through these, making it possible for blorps to congeal despite the absence of a straight vector between them. It’s even possible to use trumpets to trace blorp adjacency — blorpjacency, a term I just invented — through other-colored blorps. I haven’t actually made this work, but it’s there for real blorp-maxxers.

Probably it sounds like I despise Blorp!, but that isn’t the case. It’s a fine game. Clever, even, at times, with the trumpets that blast into each other’s mouths and make weird adjacencies a genuine possibility. My kids find it amusing. We’re required by blorp law to comment upon each grotesque feature. Sometimes my seven-year-old will decline to take a beneficial tile because it scares her. I get it, kid. Rather than focusing on her score, she tries to gather as many of the green blorp appendages, the ones that seem to be sharting ball-pit balls into the aether. She thinks that’s a hoot.

And it is a hoot, if more for the sheer improbability of its illustrative style than because the tile laying is particularly interesting. And it isn’t as though the game is so competitive that pursuing a sideline in ball collecting presents that much of a ding to anybody’s score. Which makes the game a good enough choice for the kiddos.

Until the novelty of those blorps wears thin, anyway.

I don’t have one for this.

I can feel it coming. That moment of escape. The first couple of times, the girls were eager to see what other misshapen lumps they might schlorp together. After only those two plays, they’re more hesitant. I hope the end is in sight. Despite liking Blorp! well enough, there are better games out there, even if they’re slightly more competitive or tricky. Even if they don’t feature monsters with misplaced holes. Especially then.

A complimentary copy of Blorp! was provided by the publisher.

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