Deep Impact

The first thing you’ll notice about the game is the collection of big, squishy dice. Asteroids? Diceteroids? Whatever, they’re squidgy, vibrant, and they look like they were made for giants with anger issues. They’re also incredibly tactile. I mean seriously, seriously good fun to play with. In the aforementioned burrito game, the titular burritos were also squishy, but not in a ‘toss up and down in your hand’, fiddly, juggley, kind of way, not like these asteroids. You’ll notice that the asteroids include all the standard dice types for a tabletop RPG. You’ve got a D6, D8, D10, D12, and a D20, which is really cool. Firm bouncy, and satisfying to play with, like so many of the best things in life. They might even be the gentle nudge you need to get your hardcore D&D friend to emerge from behind their GM screen and engage in some primal tomfoolery.

Playing the game is simple enough that the rules are printed on a three-fold sheet of paper. Everyone plays a card from their hand, face-down, and then they’re all revealed. Most show one of the dice on them, and there are a couple of special cards too. If yours is the only card showing a particular die – congratulations! – you just take it. If two or more of you play the same card, however, it’s battle stations. The players who matched scramble to grab that die and throw it at the other person. Imagine Cobra Paw, but you could throw the tile at the other people. If you hit the other person, you add the loser’s card to your score pile. If you miss, you can expect it to be picked up and returned with all the haste of a Happy Meal box full of turds.

When everybody has licked their wounds, and the losers take what’s left in the pool of unclaimed dice, you move on to the part where you score the majority of the points. The player with the die with the most sides throws it onto the table. Then the next biggest die, and so on. The trick here is to aim to knock the other dice to change their scores. There is nothing as satisfying as picking up your feeble D6, aiming at the D20 with an 18 or something ridiculous on it, and knocking it down to single figures. Even if you don’t win the round, there’s this delicious, spiteful part of your brain which is doused with dopamine when you prevent some smug git from winning. It’s a glorious feeling, and it abounds in Asteroid Dice.

Abounds, I tell you!

Final thoughts

This was never going to be a big review. It’s a game about chucking squidgy things at your mates. I’ve just posted reviews of Skymines (here) and Beyond The Sun (here) which are space games that take themselves seriously, but Asteroid Dice is a stupid, raucous blast. Throwing stuff at people is fun, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. I’ll fight them with squidgy dice from 3ft.

The best advice I can give you if you’re thinking about backing the game, or picking it up if you’re reading this post-Kickstarter, is to consider two things. Firstly, who will you play it with, and secondly, where will you play it? If your answer is ‘With the elderly and toddlers in a china & knife warehouse”, then it’s not for you. In all seriousness though, some people don’t like any kind of conflict at all, so be mindful of who’s around the table, and what space you have to play it in.

Asteroid Dice is silly and funny, and I can see it getting plenty of play in the garden and at barbecues over the summer. It’s a great game for non-gamers too if they’re willing to give it a go. While I wouldn’t necessarily endorse my own house rules for playing with my oldest mates of ‘loser takes a drink’ and ‘headshots only’, we certainly had a blast with it. It’s a game which won’t take up a lot of space and packs a lot of fun into a few cards and squodgy blocks. I’m looking forward to seeing what Camden Games come up with next.

The Kickstarter campaign starts on May 23rd 2023, and you can find it right here.

Preview copy kindly provided by Camden Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Asteroid Dice (2023)

Design: uncredited
Publisher: Camden Games
Art: uncredited
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15 mins

The post Asteroid Dice Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

This is my dubious face

I first heard of Klask a few years back. I was scrolling through Facebook, as people of my age tend to do, and I kept seeing advertisements for the game. There were crowds of people whooping and hollering as two chaps played some game. “Denmark’s national sport!” the tagline proclaimed, which just made me think it was probably all just a bit bobbins.

Fast-forward a few years, and I start seeing the game in the wild. By “the wild”, I mean “people I’ve seen on the internet”. Incredibly, they were all singing its praises, which made me realise a) it’s actually a real thing that people can buy, and b) it’s a good game.

Could it be?

The holy grail?

Something that’s a bit like air hockey at home??

They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so it was time to see if it’s as delicious as it sounds. (Terrible metaphor, I know, just go with it.)

Get your damn hands off of my biscuits

Let’s cut to the chase. Klask is awesome. Not just I-was-given-this-game-for-free-so-I-better-say-nice-things-about-it good, but actually, properly, fan-flipping-tastic. The small wooden table fits on pretty much any table, and you guide your black, plastic strikers with magnets under the table. The strikers are used to whack the bright yellow ball around the table, trying to land it in your opponent’s recessed goal. That’s a point right there, sportsball fans.

The other ways to score are having your hapless foe land their striker in their own goal, for what the rulebook calls a ‘klask’, or alternatively, through the power of biscuits. The biscuits in this case are not the greatest biscuit on Earth – the custard cream (fight me) – but small white pieces of plastic, with teeny magnets inside. Get two of these miniature bad boys on your opponent’s striker, and it’s a point. Score six points you’re the winner, and nations will bow before you.

It’s ridiculously simple to teach and understand, and unless you have any serious motor impairments, you should find that you can play Klask with ease.

Cheap thrills

Now, having played on a Crokinole board at a convention, I’m not about to lie to you and tell you that Klask feels as shiny, dense, and substantial as Crokinole, because it doesn’t. In the same breath though, Klask costs less than £50. A decent Crokinole setup would set you back £300+, and it needs a table the size of a Smart Car to play it on. So when you look at the value of these games, Klask is an easy winner.

It makes me enormously happy – smug, almost – to say that Klask isn’t just good in the context of “for a poor man’s crokinole”. It’s just brilliant. There is so, so much emergent gameplay, and no matter how good you might think you are, there are people using tricks you haven’t even thought of, let alone tried. Dribbles, dummies, crazy bank shots, biscuit plays – these are just some of the words you can use during Klask to sound like Joe Sportsguy.

This is where you’d expect to see a review to drop its drawers and reveal its big ‘but’, and list all the negatives about the game. Truthfully though, there aren’t many negatives. You could complain that it’s not hardwood, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a cheap, mass-produced game. It’s worth keeping an eye on the Teflon discs on the bottom of the strikers, as they can scratch the board. Nothing that’s going to affect gameplay though, just aesthetics. You can buy teflon tape online for a couple of quid, as well as spare bits for Klask.

Final thoughts

Klask is cheap, it’s fun, it’s competitive, and it’s great.

What, you were expecting more here? There’s nothing else to say. If you want a decent dexterity game you can take anywhere, go and buy Klask.

Full disclosure: I’m a lucky boy and Big Potato Games sent me a copy to review. Thoughts and opinions are still my own.

Klask (2014)

Designer: Mikkel Bertelsen
Publisher: Klask
Art: Mikkel Bertelsen
Players: 2
Playing time: 10 mins

The post Klask Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I have a soft spot for dexterity games. I love the way they break down barriers between geeks like me, and people who would never normally play a board game. There’s very little thinking and planning involved, and any strategy as such is usually only as far ahead as the next turn. If you’re not sure what constitutes a dexterity game, I think of them as any game where the physical movement of pieces constitutes the game, not necessarily what happens when they get there. Think of classic games like tiddlywinks, marbles, Subbuteo, even throwing playing cards into a bowl.

Let’s have a look at a modern dexterity game, Men At Work.

What’s In The Box?

A dexterity game can live or die on the quality of its components, because the game is built around how they interact with one another, how they feel, and how they move. Men At Work is packed with really nicely made wooden pieces. In the box you’ll find girders in four colours (orange, purple, black and white), big grey support blocks, bricks and beams that the workers sometimes have to carry, a deck of cards, a cardboard hook and crane, and finally the star of the show, the workers themselves.

How adorable is that? Construction meeples with hard hats!

The hook I mentioned above is for hooking fallen meeples and pieces out from under the construction, which turns into a part of the game itself. If you want to change things up, the cardboard crane can be built and placed in the middle of the starting construction. It adds an obstacle to build around, but also use as support.

How To Play

Setup

To setup the basic game you take three of the big grey supports and place them on the table. If you want to make things easier, lie them flat down, but if you like a challenge, stand them on end. Now place one of each of the different coloured girders however you like, as long as each of the supports has at least one girder touching it. Finally, take a worker and balance them anywhere on a girder.

The construction cards get shuffled and the boss card, Rita, gets put in the deck about a quarter of the way down. Give each player two safety certificates, then make sure there’s a good supply of all of the pieces all around the table so they’re within reach of the players. The last thing you want is someone bumping the table while reaching for something.

Now we’re ready to play.

Playing The Game

On their turn each player turns over the top card of the construction deck and places it next to the deck, adding to the discard pile. Now you look at card you just turned, and the back of the next card in the deck. This combination will tell you two things. Firstly it tells whether you’re placing a worker or girder, and if so, which colours to choose from. A worker has to stand on one of the two colours available, and a girder has to be one of the colours. Secondly, you’re given some rules for placing them.

The back of the rule book has a full of explanation for each of these rules, and every card is numbered, so finding the one you’re looking-up is nice and quick while you’re learning. By way of examples, a worker might have to be placed and then have a brick and a beam balanced on them, or they might have to be placed right on the end of a girder. A girder however might have to touch two girders of different colours to itself, or might have to balance on a single other girder.

Players take turns placing pieces -with one hand only – and the precarious structure grows ever-bigger. You’re allowed to move other pieces as you place your own, but only if you move them with the piece you’re trying to place. Once the Boss Rita card comes out of the deck, if the piece you place is now the highest one in play, you win an Employee of the Month award token.

London Bridge Is Falling Down, Falling Down…

As you’ve probably guessed by now, stuff breaks in this game. Beams and girders fall off, workers plunge to their doom, even their cute little hard hats can get knocked off. It’s an inevitable, and hilarious, part of the game. If the piece which succumbs to gravity’s irresistible pull hits the table, the player who caused it to happen loses one of their safety certificates. However, it that piece never makes it to the floor and stays clinging onto the structure, things are okay, and you keep your certificate.

If pieces do fall, that player immediately ends their turn, and the next player, instead of turning a card, grabs the cardboard hook. Before they can play, they need to use the hook to extract any fallen things from underneath the structure. If they knock anything down doing this, they then lose a certificate too, and the hook passes to the next player, and so on. Any pieces you rescue get added back to the supply.

Play continues this way until one of the three game end conditions are met:

1. The best worker wins – depending on the number of players, earning a certain amount of Employee of the Month awards wins the game.
2. The safest worker wins – if there’s only one player left with any safety certificates, they win.
3. Construction halts – if you run out of building materials, or the last worker gets placed, the game ends and the worker with the most combined safety certificate and Employee of the Month awards wins.

Final Thoughts

I really like Men At Work. Sometimes it’s nice to play something that requires almost no thinking and strategy, and I love how just about anyone, of any age can play this, and do well. As your construction gets taller and taller, it becomes more and more dangerous, and you’ll end up with workers wedged between girders where they’ve fallen but not made it to the ground, girders precariously balanced and swinging around under the weight of a badly placed exhalation.

All of the chunky pieces feel nice, there’s a good weight to them, and they make a really satisfying noise when you put them back in the box. The workers are so cute, and the little hard hats are just the icing on the cake. Their arms have little indents in them just to make balancing beams and bricks that little bit harder.

There’s tons of replay value, as the game turns out different every time. The way the cards use the back of the next card in the shuffled deck adds a lot of variety to the game, and there are plenty of other ways to keep things fresh. You can add the crane to the game as I mentioned before, which simultaneously gets in the way of your building, but also gives you something else to use as a support for your architectural wonder (or monstrosity). There’s also a variant called Skyscraper, which sees you building on the bottom half of the box the game comes in.

Men At Work is a game I think most people will create house rules for. I quite often play with more than two safety certificates per person when playing with my son, or we’ll have a rule that if a brick or beam fall, you can replace them without penalty. I have a great time playing it with people my own age too, and after a couple of drinks peoples’ judgement and overconfidence come through, with hilarious and disastrous results.

If you ever played something like Rhino Hero, or built a house of cards, and enjoy creating these teetering erections, you’re really going to like Men At Work. There’s very little to dislike about the game, unless you just don’t like balancing or dexterity games. The production values are really high, even the box insert is perfectly formed to hold everything in place, with the worker meeples lined up like a little terracotta army. Designer Rita Modl has taken the game we all play when waiting our turn – piling up components – and refined it into this charming, funny, and at times fiercely competitive game. If you’re a fan of the type of game, pick it up, you won’t regret it.

The post Men At Work Review appeared first on Punchboard.