Gaming in Pearland

I received a small shipment of games yesterday from Time Well Spent. I was mostly grabbing up the recently released Runebound expansions from Fantasy Flight Games. However, I also added a few games that I did not receive at Christmas. One game that just sort of fell onto my radar, mostly to get the shipping discount, was Wallamoppi from Out of the Box games. I got a chance to play at lunch yesterday, and what I found was a very lite dexterity game that was surprisingly good fun.

Wallamoppi is similar to Jenga in that you have a stack of wooden objects which you must remove and replace on your turn. Wallamoppi adds a twist on this though using a 2 part game, and a very unique timer. A quick look inside the nice wood box reveals a black draw string bag with 18 dark and 18 lite colored wooden disks and two marbles inside. You also get a very short and concise rulebook, as well as the timer which is built into the box itself. The components of the game are very well done, and certainly worth the price.

The game itself is divided into two phases. This is a tow player game, and players can either be the lite or the dark player. They represent their selection by taking one disk of the correct color from the bag and placing it in front of them. Starting with the dark player you draw a tile out of the bag and begin building a wall. This wall is the stack from which you grab pieces in phase two. You draw disks to play from the bag randomly, so you might play either a lite or a dark disk on your turn. The wall you build will have 8 disks, always in a single line, on the bottom. The next level will have 7, then 6 etc until the lite player caps off the top with the last remaining disk that theypulled out to begin the game. With the wall built, you set the box on end, attach the included chute and move to phase two.

In phase two of the game, players alternate taking turns grabbing a disk from the wall and stacking on top of the single lite disk at the top of the wall. If you played well in the first round it should be fairly easy to pull your pieces from the wall. You can only use one hand to remove pieces, and you can only remove pieces of your own color (unlike the first phase where you played whatever you drew from the bag). Your goal is to be the the player to last successfully stack a disk without knocking over the whole tower. If a few pieces fall out of the wall when you remove your disk that is fine, those pieces are still playable, and the game continues. So what about the timer? The timer adds just a little bit to the game, and really helps to make it fun. In addition to grabbing a disk and placing it at the top of the tower, you must also grab the marble rolling down through the box before it reaches the end. If you fail to grab the marble in time you lose.

Wallamoppi takes about 10 - 20 minutes to play. It is a simple two player game of dexterity that is a great time filler. I recommend this game to anyone interested in dexterity games, and if you like playing Jenga, you will likely like Wallamoppi.