Many Short Games: Part the Third

Welcome to Many Short Games: Part the Third. Today I want to talk about dexterity games. These are games that you need a steady hand or that require some sort of physical manipulation of the pieces in order to play. Dexterity Games aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but these ones are so quick that if you hate them, they will at least be over fast.  If you love them, you can play many of them in a short span of time.

AttrAction (R&R Games): First, I want to give props for the pun in the title. Well played R&R. AttrAction is a game of collecting rare earth magnets by pitching a Shooter magnet into a field of magnets and hoping to get several to stick together.  If they do, you get to keep the bunch that stuck together, even if they don’t include your shooter magnet. It’s a simple premise but I cannot count the number of times I have hit the wrong pole pitching my Shooter magnet onto the field and had all the magnets go shooting off in different directions instead of sticking together. I’ve also pitched many a magnet off the table (and if you are a clever opponent and can get your stack of captured magnets in place off the table’s edge to capture an errantly pitched magnet bonus! More magnets for you!). Play ends with the last magnet being captured and the winner is the person holding the biggest stack of magnets.

Bounce Off (Mattel): In this game, players try to land their balls in the grid to match a pattern on a card randomly drawn from the pattern stack. The ball has to bounce at least once before taking up residence in the game grid. The person who manages, by some miracle, to create the pattern on the card, takes the card and a new pattern is drawn. The winner is the person with the most points – which probably won’t ever be me as I tried to properly play the blue balls onto the field for the picture and you can see how that went. What you don’t see are the two balls that went careening off the surface and the one that didn’t even make the board but sadly rolled around the front of the pic. The yellow balls I hand dropped onto the grid just to be done with the photoshoot.

Chopstick Dexterity Mega Challenge 3000 (Mayday Games): This is currently one of my favorite games to play, but I’ve been working on my chopstick-fu for about two decades now. If you can’t comfortably wield chopsticks, you are going to haaaaaate this game so much. Before getting into the play of the game, I’d like to talk about the “Meta” of this game. Like a lot of Japanese things, this has a story behind it (remember the whole rigamarole about Iron Chef? Same sort of deal). Apparently, young Japanese people are losing the ability to use chopsticks so a bunch of Japanese think-tank thinkers devised a reality show to bring back the young people’s chopstick-fu skills. This is the game of that show, which actually doesn’t exist.  Just like Chairman Kaga. The game itself is fun and chaotic. There are 5 different shapes and 5 different colors (25 pieces total) that all start in the big bowl placed in the center of the play area. Several chits which have a particular colored piece of “sushi” on one side and a generic picture on the other are laid out sushi side down on the table. One chit is flipped up and players have to try to get as many of the same shape sushi and/or the same color sushi into their smaller bowls. You can’t start with your chopsticks over the large bowl (the forbidden area is a cylinder the size of the big bowl’s edge that goes ceiling ward to infinity) but nothing says you can’t move the bowl with your chopsticks or fight your opponent for the piece of sushi that they have managed to grab. Once the sushi is in the smaller bowl it is safe. When all the appropriate pieces have been taken, count up the correct color and shapes in the bowls, scoring one point for each correct shape or color. The person with the most points claims the chit (the actual piece represented on the chit is a tiebreaker in case you need it). The first one to a certain number of chits wins.

Shaky Manor (Blue Orange Games): This game is made up of a “haunted” house box with 8 different colored rooms that are all interconnected. Also living in this house are ghosts, spiders, snakes and marbley eyeballs that are nigh impossible to keep from rolling where you don’t want them to. Oh, and treasure because there should be a reason to go exploring a house with giant rolling eyeballs living in it. Just saying. Anyway, the game starts with your  Meeple, the treasure, the ghosts, snakes, spiders and traveling eyeballs all rattling around in the house. Someone flips up a room card, and you have to tilt the house this way and that to get your Meeple and the treasure into that room sans any ghosts, snakes, spiders or eyeballs. If you are the first person to do so, you win the card. Play continues until a set number of cards are won. Or someone gets fed up with the eyeballs and chucks the whole house across the room.  Either or.

Suspend (Melissa and Doug): This game is super fun and probably the least annoying of  the dexterity games. It also plays well with the younger crowd, keeping in mind the 4 to 5 year old set’s penchant for making up rules as they go along. In Suspend, every player gets a set of colored wires with different lengths and number of bends. Play begins with rolling the die and placing the wire that matches the color of the die face on the structure. The only rules are that you can only use one hand to hang your wire, your wire can’t occupy a space that is already taken by a previously placed wire (although if your wire slides into an occupied space after you place it, that’s fine) and at no time can the structure touch the playing surface. If the structure collapses, congratulations! All those wires that fell off are now in your hand. If you don’t have the color wire that comes up on the die, you take one from the draw pile (if there is one) or another player and play that wire.  If there are no wires of that color left, you lose your turn and play goes to the next person. The player that hangs all their wires first wins the game.

-JQ