Attendance for college students is unpredictable and sparse over winter break. Physical dexterity games, which tend to focus attention on "man vs nature" rather than "man vs man", are thus excellent tools for handling these small, unstable game parties.
These games do great as "appetizers" or "salads" for a game party. They finish quickly and instantly draw the interest of new arrivals into the party.
Hamsterrolle seems to play better with fewer players and works very well to keep early arrivers occupied. We didn't get into the real ins and outs of the strategy, but it was nevertheless a lot of fun.
Like most dexterity games, Hamsterrolle quickly runs into grey areas no matter how carefully they try to define the rules. Thus, I did not encourage particularly competitive play, and we improvised a lot of house rules.
Once enough party traffic arrived, it became too dangerous to play on Hamsterrolle a table and we had to move the game to the floor. Unfortunately, this made moves very uncomfortable to execute.
Bamboleo stands up much higher on the floor and is thus more practical when there's a lot of traffic. It is really more a parlor trick than a competition - figuring out who wins or loses just isn't as important as the intriguing discussions about what effects disturbing various pieces will have.
The dexterity required is only temporary, as your hand only needs to be steady for the critical seconds during which you remove a piece.
It is also very easy to improvise alternate rules: you can play it Jenga like, or - like we did - you can simply see how many items the group as a whole can remove before things collapse.
We also found we could make things quite a bit harder by having round pieces lying on their side. This generates unpredictability and livelier discussion, as you have to discuss how pieces might roll in addition to changes in table tilt.
The design of Villa Paletti is intrinsically competitive, meaning that any holes in the rules will cause problems that are harder to work around.
Of these games, Villa Paletti is physically the most demanding, requiring hands to be steady for long periods of time trying to access, remove, then replace pieces.
As a result, play falls apart unless players are evenly matched in dexterity.
No, nobody around here seems to think that attractive women play games, especially more than one in one room.
Well, for some of the games I play I will admit it takes a bit of work, but Bamboleo is pretty much a party game - heck, a gentle nudge could even turn it into a drinking game.
Now, with that being said, Bamboleo is one of my gateway games, the principal one being Werewolf (or the variant we've been playing called The Thing). From there I hope to refine their tastes to more intensive fare; it's just a short hop from Werewolf to just about all of the light but original Euros like Condottiere.
The ultimate objective is to play more satisfying games - even wargames. The farthest we've gotten is light wargames with goofy themes (Zombies!!! or Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game come to mind), although we did have success getting the light wargame Battle Cry out.
You can follow the trials and tribulations of my efforts over the years in this thread.
TGov wrote:
Nice write up on the dexterity games.
Hey, thanks! I just got Tumblin-Dice and can't wait to try it with the gang!
