Catacombs and Flick 'em Up. I feel like I’ve got just the right spread with those three.
I strongly, strongly recommend Set & Match if you’re a crokinole fan. Plays lightning quick, has a fabulous layout for big risks, a spectacular rally system, and (speculating here) a massive skill ceiling.
There’s a double sized playmat edition I’m going to have to end up owning, but it’s expensive, and even more so outside Europe, but heads up anyway. As it stands the little cardboard version is cheap as dirt and it’s marvelous.
Oh, it’s probably worth mentioning the rules are a bit of a mess. Not too bad if you’re familiar with tennis, but yikes if you aren’t. This is not to say the rules are a mess, just that their presentation is. It’s a really good tabletop representation of the sport!
Honestly I’d have dozens of these games if they weren’t an occasional novelty for most of the folks I play with. Elzra will be launching Phantom Division later this year (a spiritual successor to Seal Team Flix), I’m holding off on their 2nd edition of Catacombs & Castles right now, there’s that awesome little Star Trek Conflick in the Neutral Zone and Flick Fleets…
…you can see where I’m going. Happily the weird little dex subgenre is alive and well. But I’ve got a good spread.
Hey maybe you can help so I can stop waffling: did Men at Work ever get a Pretzel 1st edition? I’d love a woody box for it, but if it always shipped in cardboard I’ll just get it the next time it’s in.
Me too. There are some fundamental problems with the game as a competitive experience (which is the cause for concern by most accounts). But as a game you can (and should) play while holding either a beer or a pretzel, I find those concerns fundamentally boring.
This is the keystone of any good dexterity game, in my opinion, be it flicking, stacking, tossing, whatever. Something all of these games share are very public, usually catastrophic failures. If I play a game where that experience (hopefully many times over) isn’t an absolute highlight of the night, it doesn’t meet the standard.
I wish I could get into junk art more but I feel like learning four (different) sets of rules per game is a mistake that conflicts with the spirit of the game.
FWIW I find that all those different rule sets are part of what makes the game great (although there was one variant which I thought wasn’t fun, and was keen to not use again).
They allow the rules for any given game to be super simple – which does let you focus on the core gameplay – while still being varied from game to game, and therefore not getting dull.
I’ve not actually played Junk Art. But there’s something about having multiple mini-games available in a boxed product that can extinguish the fun from the experience. Like how there are thousands (millions?) of games you can play with a standard deck of cards (or two), but actually trying to get people to sit down and learn a new game to play with that deck of cards can be difficult. There’s just something about “here’s the canonical way to use these components” that grabs peoples’ attention.
Yes that’s it. There might be good reasons to put multiple rules down (maybe some people prefer to co-op like games) but for me I think you put these toys in front of me I want to play the very best game with them and not weed through duffers or that have a bad arc due to randomness.
It’s like if Jenga came with a dozen rules I don’t think it’d be a huge success. I think Jenga has a confidence about its best idea and it became a phenomenon because of it - but you could clearly do different things with those blocks.
