Friday Filler: Dropolter

Most dexterity games involve removing things from a stack and trying to have the stack collapse or stacking things and not having things fall down, because if you cause the stack to fall down, you lose. Think Jenga or Bausack or Villa Paletti. One of the newest games from Oink Games is all about dropping things. Or rather, about dropping the right thing or things. Dropolter begins when everyone is asleep, but all of a sudden, eerie noises wake them up in the night. A ghostly wail. A thud. A boom. And then one-by-one, ghosts begins to appear from beneath each of the players’ beds. Fortunately, everyone is prepared and has the five charms to hand—quite literally—that will ward off the ghosts. However, the charms—each a little brass bell—have got mixed up with a number of items, including a Ring, a Cookie, a Key, a Seashell, and a Gem—and each player needs to get the right ones out of his hand whilst keeping the bells in his hand. Sounds easy, right? Well, it is far from easy, because each player has to do it only with the hand that he is holding the objects in. In other words, he cannot use his other hand!

That is about as far as the backstory goes in Dropolter—a game designed to be played by between two and five players, aged six or more, and in fifteen minutes—and as backstories go, that is incredibly thin. What it amounts to is that in each round, a player has five objects in his hand. These are a Ring, a Cookie, a Key, a Seashell, and a Gem. At the start of a round, a Theme Card is drawn and this will determine which of the five items each player has to drop from his hand. The Theme Cards range in difficulty from one to four objects. The first player to drop the required number of items from his hand and grab the very friendly Ghost Piece wins the round and is awarded a brass bell. This is added to his hand on subsequent rounds. The first player to get five brass bells, wins the game.

If a player drops a wrong object, he must start again with all five objects in his hand. Worse, if he drops a brass bell, he loses it and it is not added back into his hand.

The objects themselves are shaken in a player’s at the start of each round, and then after that, what a player is doing is manipulating them as they sit on his palm with his fingers and thumb, attempting to push, pull, and tip them from his hand with dropping anything else. This requires no little manual dexterity. There is a delightful sense of shared frustration as everyone concentrates, trying to manipulate the objects in their palm in a manual exercise that we rarely have to attempt, exacerbated when someone drops the wrong object, and relieved when someone drops the right objects.

Physically, Dropolter is as nicely done as you would expect for a game from Oink Games. The rules are easy to read and understand and the components, although small, each have a different shape and tactile feel that aids play.

With its promise of “Ghost vs Palm Muscle” action, Dropolter has a simplicity and physicality that are both a hindrance and a boon. It is simple to learn and teach, making it suitable for a wide audience, but it does not offer a great deal of game play beyond the short term. Its physicality gives it a highly interactive presence at the table, but not everyone has the manual dexterity to play and there are a lot of little pieces which are all too easy to loose. Yet Dropolter is the perfect filler game because it does not take that long to play. It is also the perfect novelty game, its very concept and physicality is intriguing enough to anyone who has not played it to ask, “How does this work again?” What this means is that Dropolter is a great little icebreaker, its novelty big enough despite the size of its box and components to make people want to play.