Friday Filler: Rafter Five

Everyone has agreed that the best way of getting off the island is to build a raft. However, nobody can agree on the best way to build a raft, or even how to build a raft. Whilst everyone has also agreed that the best way to get off the island with their treasure is the raft, the raft is so rickety that it is in danger of collapsing and dumping everyone into the sea. Fortunately, there are no sharks, but when you fall into the sea, it is everyone for themselves as they try to rescue their treasure. It is perfectly possible to rescue your own treasure, but not the treasures belonging to your fellow raft builders, and if you lose their treasure, they will get mad at you and throw you off the raft! This is the set-up for Rafter Five, a fast-playing dexterity game for one to six players, ages seven and up. Published by Oink Games—best known for the games Scout and Deep Sea Rescue—Rafter Five is a game that uses all of its components, including the box lid and base, looks great on the table, plays in twenty minutes or so (but probably faster depending on the dexterity of the players), and surprisingly for an Oink Games title, is not a squeeze to get back in the box!

Rafter Five consists of five Rafters, forty-two Treasure Chests, six Penalty Boards, one Raft Card, forty-two Lumber Cards, and the rules leaflet. The Rafters are the game’s meeples, ones that the players will move around from one turn to the next. They are much larger than standard meeples and vary in size and shape, tall, fat, thin, short, and really help to give the game much of its character. Plus, they feel good in the hand. The Treasure Chests come in six colours, so that each player has a set of seven. The Penalty Boards also come in six colours to match the Treasure Chests and have five slots marked with an ‘X’. If a player’s Penalty Board is filled up with the Treasure Chests of the other players, he loses and is out of the game. The Raft card forms the base for the players’ raft, whilst the Lumber Cards are slightly wavey lengths of card, marked with the sea on one side and wood on the other.

Set up is simple. The game’s box is turned upside down, placed in the centre of the table, and the lid to the box is placed on top, also upside down. The Raft Card is put on top of the lid, as are all five Rafters. Each player receives the Penalty Board and Treasure Chests of his colour. In two- and three-player games, each player will be given Penalty Boards and Treasure Chests of multiple colours.

The aim of Rafter Five is to build as big a raft as possible, whilst loading it up with treasure, without it collapsing. When it does collapse, the player who caused the collapse receives all of the Treasure Chests tipped into the sea. He keeps his own Treasure Chests to place again, but Treasure Chests belonging to the other players must be put onto his Penalty Board. If a player accrues five Treasure Chests belonging to other players on his Penalty Board, the game ends, and he is the loser, whilst everyone else wins! The game also ends when there are no more Lumber cards to place or all of the players have put their Treasure Chests on the raft. In either case, the player with the most Treasure Chests belonging to other players on his Penalty Board is the loser and everyone else wins.

On his turn, a player does three things. He picks up a single Rafter from the raft and then a Lumber Card. He must then place the Lumber Card on the raft and the Rafter on top of that. The Lumber Card must be placed so that part of it is on top of another Lumber Card on the raft (except on the first turn, when a player is free to place the Lumber card how he wants). Lastly, he put one of his Treasure Chests anywhere on the Lumber Card he just placed.

Rafter Five is as simple as that, but the longer a game goes on and the more that Lumber Cards and Treasure Cards are added, the more precarious the splay of the Lumber cards that make up the poorly constructed raft grows. The Rafters are the balancing factor, acting as a counterweight to lengths of Lumber Card hanging over the edge of the raft with their Treasure Chests perched precariously on their lengths. Picking the right one can the key to a tense, but safe turn, but pick the wrong one and everything goes tumbling into the sea! Placing a Treasure Chest where it is more likely to tip into the sea, such as at the end of a Lumber Card, dangling over the edge, is a legitimate move, but this highlights the key aspect to Rafter Five. Most dexterity games are about placing one thing or removing one thing to a stack. Rafter Five is about placing three—the Rafter, the Lumber Card, and the Treasure Chest!

Physically, Rafter Five is very nicely presented and packaged. The components are of good quality and the Rafter pieces are nice and sturdy in the hand, and ever so cute! The simplicity of the game means that the rules are easy to read and grasp.

Rafter Five does include a solo-mode, but it is more of a stacking puzzle than a game, so consequently less interesting. That said, the game plays well at whatever player count, with four or five being about right, and it is suited to play by the family, being very easy to teach and learn. Rafter Five is a great filler game, easy to learn, quick to play, but full of tension that grows and grows as more Lumber Cards are added to the raft.

Friday Filler: Tinderblox

Dexterity games are not a favourite of Reviews from R’lyeh. In fact, Reviews from R’lyeh will go so far as to say that it hates Jenga, would describe Jenga as being boring, after all, it is just a series of plain wooden blocks, and a terrible game—even if it can be called a game. That said, combine Jenga with something like Dread: Dredd (and indeed, Dread) and you actually have a game and a point to Jenga. So, the question is, if Reviews from R’lyeh is averse to dexterity games, what is it doing reviewing a game like Tinderblox? Well, Tinderblox is small, it is bright and colourful, it has a theme, it has challenging situations set up by the game and not by the players, and it has a means of levelling the playing field—or is that camp site?—and making everyone as clumsy as each other. Published by Alley Cat Games, this is a little game that comes in a tin, a little game all about setting fire to a campfire and for that you need tinder and flames, and if it comes in a box, then ‘tinderbox’. And if the tinder and the flames are blocks of wood, then Tinderblox.

Tinderblox is designed to be played by two to six players, aged six plus, and can be played in fifteen minutes. Inside the tin the six-page rules leaflet, a Campfire Card, nineteen Instruction Cards, twenty Logs, ten Red and ten Yellow ‘Cinder’ Cubes, and two pairs of tweezers. The play of the game is simple. Three Logs are placed on the Campfire Card and the remaining logs and both the Red and Yellow ‘Cinder’ Cubes returned to the tin. Then the players take in turn to draw an Instruction Card and do exactly what it says. For example, it might show a Red ‘Cinder’ Cube on top of a Yellow ‘Cinder’ Cube or a horizontal Log with a Red ‘Cinder’ Cube and a Yellow ‘Cinder’ Cube on top of it at either end. The player has to put these new Logs and Cubes exactly on the fire as the Campfire Card shows. The player can do this in any fashion that he likes, as long the pieces he adds remain upright and the fire does not collapse. If it does, that player is eliminated. Play continues like this until there is one player remaining. He is the winner.

Which sounds like it is easy. It is not, because what has not mentioned so is the tweezers. Tinderblox comes with two pairs of tweezers and it comes with two pairs of tweezers because the player cannot use his fingers. Instead, he must use the tweezers. It does not matter which pair of tweezers, because either would be a candidate for the worst pair of tweezers in the world. They really, really, REALLY are rubbish. However, they are all Tinderblox has and they have absolutely no grip. Well almost no grip. Or just enough grip to imagine that a player he could imagine getting hold of Log or a Red ‘Cinder’ Cube or a Yellow ‘Cinder’ Cube and placing it on the campfire. It is possible. It is annoyingly difficult and that is point. It is what makes Tinderblox so frustratingly difficult and gives a player a sense of achievement when he places the Logs and ‘Cinder’ Cubes in the right arrangement.

Physically, everything is nice about Tinderblox. The tin is perfect, the rules leaflet explains everything easily, the Campfire Card is double-sided for different set-ups, the Instruction cards easy to understand, and the wooden pieces are bright, colourful, and simple. The tweezers are crap. Which is the point.

Tinderblox is simple and portable. The tiny tin fits into any bag and as long as there is a flat surface, there is somewhere to set a fire and keep it going with the simplest of Logs and Cinders whilst using the worst tweezers in the world. The only downside to the game is the player elimination aspect, but the game plays quick to start again, so nobody is get waiting for too long, plus the playing time for Tinderblox is very short and so never outstays its welcome. Tinderblox is a lovely looking, delightfully undexterous filler of a game.

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.

Pushing the Simplicity

Once upon a time you could step into a public house—the pub, if you will—and play a game. From Dominos and Skittles to Shove ha'penny and Nine Men’s Morris, these were games that were enjoyed up and down the country, but with the coming of cable and satellite television and being able to watch sport with a pint in hand, the popularity of such games diminished. Such games though have always had a poor reputation, often seen as a means to encourage the consumption of alcohol and gambling, and in some cases outright banned by kings as distractions for men who should be otherwise engaged in archery practice. Now the tradition of pub games has not gone away, as evidenced in Dave Gorman vs. The Rest Of The World, but in the 21st century times have changed with the playing board games being an acceptable pastime, one that can be played openly in public, whether that is in the pub or elsewhere. 

Which is where Push It: Ultimate Skill, Infinite Locations comes in.

Published by Push It Games following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Push It: Ultimate Skill, Infinite Locations is a very simple game that can be played anywhere that has a flat, smooth surface. A table, a floor, a newspaper laid on the ground—anywhere. Designed for two to four players, it comes with eight Pucks in four colours, a Jack, a cloth carrying bag, and an eight-page rules booklet. To be fair, Push It is so simple that it does not need a rules booklet, but it includes examples, explanations, and variations, so that it can played as a team game, with two players, and so on.

Push It starts with the Jack being placed in the centre of the table. Then everyone takes their Pucks and whilst sat round the table, take it turns to push, chop, or flick one of their Pucks at the Jack. They get to do this once, from the edge of the table, for each Puck. There is no second attempt at getting Pucks closer to the Jack. Once everyone has launched their Pucks at the Jack, scoring takes place. The player with the closest Puck to the Jack scores a point. If he has both Pucks closest to the Jack, he scores two points. Knocking both another player’s Pucks and the Jack is perfectly legal, but knocking the Jack of the table loses a player two points. Then another round starts and play continues until somebody has scored a total of seven points and wins.

And that is it.

To test it out, Reviews from R'lyeh took it along to Afternoon Play where it proved to be popular as both a game for four players and a team game for eight prior to a longer game.

It should also be pointed out that Push It has perhaps the most singular rule in any game in any of the games in the Reviews from R'lyeh ludography. This is the 'Bum Shuffling' rule. Essentially a player can lean and in the process, lift one buttock from his seat in order to push, flick, or chop one of his Pucks. He cannot though move his chair or shuffle said buttocks...

Push It: Ultimate Skill, Infinite Locations is a nice simple game. Even better, it is a nice, simple, and well-produced game. Both the Pucks and the Jack are beautifully polished pieces of wood that feel good in the hand and nicely slide across the playing surface of your choice. Whilst it might be reminiscent of pub games of old, Push It is the pub game that does not need the pub whose simplicity makes it the perfect filler game wherever and whenever.