I’ve previously blogged a story by the name Barrel of Monkeys, but not the actual game… which struck me as an oversight, so guess what I’m talking about this week?
Barrel of Monkeys isn’t as old as Jacks, but it’s definitely another classic. Your container is – surprise – a barrel, and the contents are a set of monkeys*, each with arms curling in opposite directions. To play the game, you hold one monkey by its upper arm (Pick a side. Congratulations, that is now the upper side) and hook another monkey’s arm through the first one’s lower. Continue to make a chain in this fashion until something drops! It’s not at all complicated, but for young ones it practices fine motors skills, and even older players may find their arms protesting the static hold. That, and if you have cats they will definitely contribute their own Challenge Mode. If you don’t have cats – or they’re not interested – you can make it harder yourself by combining multiple sets!
While the amount of monkeys in a set varies, the official scoring for multiplayer is has each monkey worth a certain amount of points. When you stop (either because someone fell or because you ran out of monkeys), you score however many monkeys are still on your chain, and the first player to reach the victory condition (points equivalent to completing the full chain) wins. Though as kids, we always just went for “whoever can make the full chain first.” It’s your choice by which rules you play! The objective for single-player is more along the latter lines, as you time yourself making the whole chain and try to be progressively faster.
*Monkeys are not required to play this game. You may alternatively utilize a Barrel of Pterodactyls!
This game is a classic! Despite the name, it has nothing to do with folks named Jack – unless your name is Jack and you’re playing Jacks, of course.
For any of my readers who don’t know, a “jack” in this case is a plastic or metal “X” shape, with extra spokes facing front and back to make it 3D. The game Jacks uses these – shocking, I know – and a bouncy ball. “That’s it?” you ask. Yep! Now scatter the jacks on the floor, throw the ball into the air, grab a jack and catch the ball before it bounces twice… all with the same hand! This is how Jacks is played. If you succeed, move the jack you grabbed to your other hand and go for another! The goal is to get all of them (my set has 10, which I’m assuming is standard) without ever letting the ball bounce twice in one throw. If it does bounce twice, re-scatter the jacks and try again.
Got them all? Great! No, you’re not done yet – you’ve just progressed to the next level, which is picking them up two at a time! Once you’ve picked them all up in pairs, go for three in a throw, four in a throw, etc. until you either give up or manage to pick up the whole set in one bounce. Good luck! And remember, you can legally shift jacks without picking any up so long as you still catch the ball in time. Shoving them closer together is a valid move!
If you want to play Jacks competitively, simply trade off turns whenever you miss a throw. The winner is whoever makes it through the full progression first!
Combining spatial recall and luck with teamwork, The Secret Door is a cooperative rendition of the classic Memory matching game. In this version, players are detectives trying to determine which three Valuables are behind the Secret Door, using process of elimination… and they’re up against the clock!
Like Memory, there are two of each Valuable, ranging from a treasure map to a statue to a stack of cash. However, unlike Memory, three of these are chosen at random and hidden under the Secret Door, and the rest are shuffled in with the twelve Time Cards before being laid out face-down on the board.
Once it’s all set up, players take turns revealing two cards. Any Time Cards discovered are set face-up along the top of the board, while matching pairs of Valuables go to the Vault at the bottom. Mismatched Valuables are then returned to face-down before the next player’s turn. Try to remember what’s where!
If you have enough paired Valuables in the Vault that you think you know which ones are missing, you can (collectively) decide to make your deduction and check it against the cards under the Secret Door. You only get one guess, though, so use it wisely!
If the twelfth Time Card is revealed, the game ends immediately. Time’s up! You’ll have to take your chances now, regardless of how far from a definitive conclusion you are. How many of the hidden Valuables can you guess right anyways? We seem to have a 2/3 trend, whenever time isn’t on our side. (Or is on our side… of the board. The photographed game above somehow had Time Cards on all three spaces of the astronomy tower, which was a very disappointing couple turns.)
I know, I know, it seems like everyone is talking about Wordle lately. But hey, there’s a reason for that! That reason being that it’s actually pretty neat.
For anyone who doesn’t know what Wordle is, here are the basics: you get six attempts to guess a five-letter word. Your guess has to be a real word, and when you hit enter its letters are color-coded as grey (not in the word), yellow (in the word, but not where you put it), and green (yup, that’s where that goes). Unless you’re using Color Blind Mode, in which case those are still-grey, blue, and orange; I think it’s neat that they have a high-contrast option!
There are also statistics, so you can see how many times you’ve played, what percentage of those you’ve successfully guessed, your max streak, current streak, and, my favorite, guess distribution: how many times you got it in one try, two tries, three, and so forth.
It’s not a particularly complicated game, and I think that’s a lot of the appeal, as well as the fact that there’s only one word per day – it’s a fun mental challenge that doesn’t take a lot of time, and you don’t fall prey to the compulsion of doing more because… well, there isn’t more to do. Not today, anyway! (There’s actually a Dork Tower strip about that, here. The previous and following are also Wordle-related, because John Kovalic knows what’s up.)
Caves & Claws is a cooperative board game, marketed for kids but fun for anyone. The premise – much like Quetzal, actually – is that you’re archaeologists trying to recover ancient artifacts.
First, you lay out the board. This is actually part of gameplay – from a shuffled set of path tiles, players take turns drawing one and setting it in their choice of orientation on an open space, until all spaces are filled. There are four spaces that don’t get paths: the two Temples in the middle of the board, and the two Caves on opposite corners. These are the Gathering Places, which will each have a face down pile of cards, four on each Cave and five on each Temple. The goal of path placement is to have as many routes between these spaces as possible, as well as at least one path leading off the edge of the board.
Next comes the part where you actually look for the artifacts. Starting from one of those entrance paths, each player will bring their pawn onto the board and into one of the Gathering Places, where they flip over the top card there (you can choose not to, but functionally, there’s little point in not). This card will be either a Treasure that you place on the Tent, or a Danger, in which case it blocks one of the open paths into that Gathering Place. If there are multiple open paths, you get to choose which one to block; this is no longer a viable route into or out of that space.
Finding yourself trapped? Don’t worry – the team has five Remedies that you can use to remove Dangers. This is done before you move, and both the Remedy and the Danger are set aside as out of the game. Be careful which Remedies you use, though, because they each only work on certain Dangers! There are also a few Dangers you don’t technically need Remedies to escape. These are the Door, the Tree, and the Boulder, which each have a gap you can squeeze through… at the expense of a Treasure already found.
Once you have all eight Treasures, have gotten all the Treasures minus those you sacrificed to escape, or have decided that collecting any more is too dangerous, all pawns exit the board through an unobstructed path off, and your rate of success is determined by how many Treasures you successfully recovered. Didn’t get them all? What can you do differently next time? On the flip side: was that too easy? Try playing with fewer Remedies! Or if you’re feeling really dangerous, no Remedies at all!
This game is great because it’s short, simple and adjustable in difficulty level… and who wouldn’t have fun scaring off monsters with Broccoli?
Tenzi is a fun dice game, with flexible rules to be as simple or complicated as you’d like! In the base version, each player gets a set of 10 dice (hence the name). For the first roll, someone will count it down and everyone will roll at once; looking at their roll, they’ll pick a number to target, usually the one they rolled the most of, and set aside all the dice with that number rolled. Afterwards, they pick up all the remaining dice and roll again! This is a speed game, so you don’t have to wait for the other players. The first person to roll their chosen number on all of their dice shouts (or exclaims at a reasonable volume) “Tenzi!” and wins.
As I mentioned before, there are several variations on this. There’s Target Tenzi, where instead of picking your number after you roll, you declare it ahead of time (either individually, or you can have everyone go for the same number), Splitzi, where you instead of ten the same, you roll for five and five of two numbers, Mega Tenzi, where you each have twenty dice instead… though that only works for two-player or solo play. “Solo play?” you ask, “But it’s a competition! How do you do that with one player?” Well, the rules also have Timed Tenzi, with a guideline for your rank depending on how long it takes you to win!
I’ve never played these variants, but the rules also outline Team Tenzi – your team can all go for the same number, or different ones, your choice-, Tenzi Tower, where instead of just setting aside your successful rolls, you have to stack them, and the one I’m most intrigued by, Stealthzi. By Stealthzi rules, if you see another player roll the number you’re going for, you can steal those dice, giving them an equal number of yours in return. The only constraints on this are that you can’t steal on the first roll of the game, nor can you steal from someone going for the same number as you.
Of course, you can also come up with your own versions. We play one that the creators would probably have named Sumzi, where we choose a number, and only set aside dice that add up to it. So we might say 7, and then set aside a five and a two, or a six and a one, or a three and a four. I imagine you could also take out the speed factor, if you wanted to, having it so everyone always rolls together, and whoever hits the goal in the least amount of rolls wins.
Whatever you choose, there are plenty of options to keep gameplay fun and fresh. And if you really want to get crazy, there’s also Twisted Tenzi, aka ‘mix ‘n match your favorites for even more dice-borne chaos!’
Yes, I have fallen prey to the hypnosis of color-by-number apps. While I realize there are probably several options along this vein, I’m going to be talking about the one I use, aptly titled Pixel Art.
The basic concept seems fairly self-explanatory — an image is divided into squares, numbered by color, and you fill it in accordingly. You don’t have to use the colors in order, or all of one color at once… in fact, it’s often easiest to start with the highest numbers, as they tend to be the least prevalent. When you select a color on the number bar, it shows how much of that color you’ve completed so far, and marks all pixels of that color with a dark grey to set them apart from the blank white of other unfilled cells. You can choose between tapping these individually to color them, or dragging your finger across several, which is quicker but risks hitting other numbers, too. If that happens the pixel will remain a paler version of that color (number still visible) until you hit it with the correct one. The page of the palette before colors 1-10 has two “Boosters”: the Color Wand, which colors multiple neighboring cells of the same color with one tap, and Color Splash, which colors everything in a set radius with one tap, regardless of color. Honestly, though, I don’t really see the point in those.
There are a couple different menus, all comprehensively organized. First there’s the main one, at the bottom of the page, sorted into Library, Daily, My Works, and Create. Yes, there’s an option to create art for this — don’t ask me how that works, I’ve never done it. Daily is fairly self-explanatory: there’s a new image there every day, like an all-year advent calendar of coloring. My Works has a second menu near the top, split into, again, “My Works,” which shows everything you’ve colored at least one pixel on, and “In Progress,” which shows only the images you haven’t completed yet. As you can imagine, In Progress is super useful for when you’ve got multiple pictures going on at once, especially the more detailed ones that can take a while to complete.
The most complicated tab is Library, which has a 4-tab menu of its own. First off, Event. Currently, there’s a “Desert World” event going on. What the event is changes regularly, but they each have thematically appropriate art, and the more of those you complete by the end of the event, the more rewards you get, including Bonus images, which is the third tab from the left — pretty much, the more event art you complete, the more bonus ones you collect. The tab between those is New, which is also fairly self-explanatory. New art appears at the top of the page, and the more you scroll down, the older the stuff you’re looking at. It’s worth noting that a lot of times, these are added in clusters, hence why my screenshot has four images pertaining to Japan all completed around the same time.
The fourth and final tab in Library is Books, which, like how In Progress acts as a filter for My Works, is effectively a subset of New. These are collections of 8 images each, bound together by a category, be it Landscapes, Comfortable Clothes, or even just “Orange Color.” You unlock each next row of the collection as you work, going through seven easier images and ending on a full one. I won’t say photorealistic, necessarily, because sometimes full pictures are intricate patterns instead, but rather than being a cutout of some concept within a given space, full images take up the entire square.
Both books and individual art are sometimes locked, and while you can buy premium, you can also just watch an ad to unlock them.
“Hold up, didn’t you already tell us about Sudoku?” Well, yes, sort of, but that was Hawaiian Sudoku! And, no, I’m not here to talk about the normal version, at least not exactly — I’m here to talk about the board game.
Yep! Sudoku is a competitive game now! Sudoku Challenge actually came out in like 2006, but I didn’t have a blog then, so we’re going to pretend this is a new discovery. The first thing to choose is which side of the board you’re playing — Sudoku (9×9 grid), or Zoodoku (6×6). What’s Zoodoku, you ask? Well, it’s the easier version of Sudoku, and much, much cuter, since instead of numbers, you’re placing animals.
Whichever you choose, the mechanics are the same — you start by placing the starter tiles (marked with a different backing), one in each box, no overlapping rows/columns, and placing each player’s chosen pawn at 0 on the scoring area. Players then take turns drawing a face-down tile and choosing where to place it. Just like regular Sudoku, it can’t be in the same row, column, or box as a tile of the same type. Unlike regular Sudoku, you have another goal: scoring. When you place a tile, you get 1 point for each other tile that shares a row, column, or box with it. Each tile is only counted once. If you’re feeling exceptionally masochistic, you can play Sudoku with a twist — instead of scoring one point for each other tile, you add up their values. Note that if you do this, you will run out of 40-point tokens; we used the Zoodoku tiles as stand-ins.
There are going to be times when prior placements leave spaces unable to be filled, like the empty space in the middle right of the board below, where the box needs a deer (blocked by row) and the row needs a raccoon (blocked by both column and box). If a player draws a tile they cannot place, the game ends immediately, and whoever has the most points wins.
No, I’m not talking about Jenga. Tower of Hell is a Roblox game where you’re trying to reach the top of the tower before the timer runs out and the tower resets. The catch? It’s a randomly generated layout each time… and there are no checkpoints.
Tower of Hell is an obby — in other words, an obstacle course. Each section of the tower sports its own challenges, from gaps you have to jump, to sliding zones (think moving sidewalks, but more likely to vroom you off the edge and halfway back down the map), to glowing areas that will kill you if you touch them. Dying respawns you at the very bottom, whereas falling off of something provides the opportunity to catch yourself on a lower level on your way down.
The progress map on the right shows where everyone is in relation to the sections, as well as the highest spot you’ve reached so far– the higher on the map it is, the more coins you get. Once someone reaches the top and steps into the victors’ archway, the timer speeds up, doubling its pace for each player who’s finished.
Usually, the clock is set for six minutes. I say usually because one of the things you can buy with coins are mutations, which affect the map for the rest of the current round — one of those is to add two minutes to the timer, and another, also pictured above, takes away the lethality of the glowing parts, so it’s just falling you need to worry about. Where mutations affect everyone, gears affect only yourself; both, however, disappear at the end of the round. In fact, the only in-game purchase of permanence are effects, which come in “boxes” that provide a random trail, gear skin (ex: Pastel Gravity Coil), or constant effect, like “Steaming,” which my avatar is sporting in the second screenshot.
As a final note, the (often witty) name of each section is displayed at their starting platform, which is the flat safe space that all sections have in common. I mention this specifically to point out that they are not the title in the lower right corner of the screen; that’s the name of whatever instrumental track is currently playing in the background.
Plenty of people play Sudoku. With its grids for numerals, one of each number per row/column, but also per square, and the many varying difficulties the initial number line-up can provide, the puzzle game is portable, convenient, and engaging. However, I don’t often play it anymore.
This story starts in an airport in Hawaii, with a bored kid and an equally bored mother waiting for a flight. Though I don’t remember the details, I do know that Mom found a book of Hawaiian Sudoku to trade off while we waited, and that when I rediscovered it about a year ago, I addicted to it all over again. Which, I mean, as far as compulsions go, playing number games while listening to my History teacher really wasn’t that bad.
So what is Hawaiian Sudoku? Well, rather than grids, it’s a map of overlapping circles laid out in an image (hibiscus, poi pounders, volcanoes, etc.). Each circle operates like the rows and columns in the original game — there can only be one of each number, 1-6, in each circle. Furthermore, the same rule applies to diagonals — straight lines cut across the image — and parts of the edges, with shading and dots indicating which segments start and end where.
Here lies the problem — I no longer know what to do with a standard Sudoku puzzle. It should be easy, right? It used to be. But now, I’m so used to circular Sudoku, with its fluid, almost hypnotic cascade effect, the grids I grew up with seem foreign, uncompromising, and almost disturbingly blank in their formatting.
So, anyhow, that’s the story of why I have to relearn traditional Sudoku, and hopefully (if I didn’t scare you off with that bit) a recommendation for you to check out the Hawaiian version! Like I said, it’s addictive, but it’s also worth it, at least I think so.
