Dexterity Games

In one of his sillier games, Karl-Heinz Schmiel casts the players as semi-psychotic cooks attempting to hone their culinary skills. Each player receives a miniature pan and a hotplate. Then each turn you can either attempt to turn up the heat, season your dish, or attempt to steal another cook's recipe in the making. Heating your hotplate is a random affair with a die, and could raise the heat on everyone's plate. Spicing the dish is heart of the game and done by up-ending small bottles filled with little colored wood pellets. When the pellets tumble out of the bottle (sometimes, if they do), the number of pellets can't exceed two, because over-spicing the dish ruins it and you have to throw it in the trash!

Components:

• 4 Stoves
  • 1 Plate
  • 4 Pedestals
  • 1 Adjusting Knob
  • 2 Plastic Rivits
• 4 Pans
• 4 Condiment Dispensers with Colored Lids
• 80 Condiments in 4 colors
  • 20 Lemon
  • 20 Pepper
  • 20 Paprika
  • 20 Herbs
• 25 Salt Crystals
• 20 Artfully Weird Dishes
• 4 Delicious Crepes
• 13 Coffee Cups
• 3 Cooking Spoons
• 1 Coffee Tray
• 4 Trays for Finished Dishes
• 1 Trash Can
• 2 Sinks
• 9 Star Tokens
• 1 Heating Die
• 1 Rule Book

"Bausack" is a classic in tactical competence games. For the first time in 20 years, it is now show cased in a box edition. The aim of all four playing varieties is to build a tower. The sack contains different wooden pieces (e.g. egg, ring, pine tree, quad) as well as a small bag of jewels for the auction variation of the game. One might end up paying many jewels to avoid building an especially difficult element. Gambling and bluffing abilities are needed as well as building competence and strategic talent. A game with endless building possibilities, it's a challenge for steady hands and shaky suspense for clever tacticians.

On an icy lake, two clans of prehistoric men clash in a match of Kairn, better known as Caveman Curling, this being an ancestor to the modern sport of curling. Players compete as individuals or are grouped into two clans, and they try to land their stones the closest to a target each round. On a player's turn he takes two actions:

• He launches a stone across the ice, flicking it wit his finger toward the target on the other end of the game board.

• To improve the positioning of his stone or the chances of it staying in place, he can choose to use either a small or large hammer or a totem. With a hammer, the player moves the stone according to the size of the hammer. As for the totem, the player sets it on top of the stone; if the totem falls off the stone, the player can shoot it again on a later turn.

If your player or clan has one or more stones closer to the center of the target than the other clan, you score points. The first player/clan to collect six points wins.

A fun dexterity game that can be played in only a few minutes. The board is split in two by a wall with a small gap in the center. Your objective is to be the first to shoot your disks though the gap using the elastic band stretched across your back wall.

At the start of the game, both players place their disks anywhere they like on their side as long as they are not blocking the central passageway. The players simultaneously use the elastic band to flick the disks through the passageway to the opponent's side. Whoever has fewer pieces on their side when time runs out wins the game.

Contents:
1 game board - 23"x14.5"
10 wooden disks
6 pegs
1 sand timer

Once rare and mysterious, now thankfully back in print, Polarity is a 2-player game using lots of magnets (so keep it away from credit cards, watches and so on). The plastic coated pieces look like Reversi/Othello discs, with black and white faces. Each piece contains a magnet, with the black side being North and the white side being South. Each player gets a stack, one plays black one plays white. A neutral red piece goes in the center of the game cloth and players start by place five each of their stack around the cloth. These flat pieces are the foundations.
On your turn, you take one piece from your stack into your hand, then bring it to bear against one of your foundations. You keep your color face up, so the opposing polarity bears against your foundation piece. This way, you can very carefully balance your new piece in the air against the foundation stone! This is just fantastic to see. The board fills up with lots of discs teetering at 45 degrees, ready to fly about if the balances are upset.
Get it right and you keep placing pieces. Make a mistake and your turn ends. Either a piece falls flat somewhere (becoming a new foundation) or pieces jump together making towers or into your hand. Your opponent takes the tower you accidentally made and places it their side up where they like. Towers get you points at the game end.
If a piece jumps to the stone in your hand, they both go back on your stack. The game ends when one player finishes their stack and points are calculated based upon towers and discs remaining. Causing the red piece to jump to another loses you the game outright.
To be honest, the scoring matters less than the tension and joy of watching the natural but weird force of magnetism at play. Because the discs are discs, they can easily roll around, causing domino effects. Because the towers increase the magnetic pull, they make it so much harder to find a safe spot to play.
If you want a strange fun game to amaze your friends and family, Polarity is hard to beat. If you want a serious 2-player game, you may prefer other abstracts. The rules could do with being shorter and simpler. Otherwise, a joyous game.
Comment from the designer "Polarity began as a sculpture. Polarity is zen. It represents that point where absolute opposites merge. In this case, the poles of the magnetic field. The quality of play is determined by one's ability to perceive balance in the midst of extremes. Each game is unique and can never be reproduced. It is in that uniqueness that I was awarded a patent from the U.S. Pat. & Trdmks. office for magnetic principle. The strategy must be viewed 3-dimensionally. It is not just control of a 2-dimensional board but must include the space above and below the playing surface."

The Game of Rock Balancing
RUK-SHUK™ is the multi award-winning point scoring game of rock-balancing! 1 to 5 players make the best use of their specially designed Game Rocks to balance as much of the formations shown on the cards as they can and score points before time runs out! Each formation is based on a real rock formation somewhere around the world - from Devil’s Tower in the USA to Pinnacle Rock in the Galapagos Islands and Pigeon Rock in Lebanon. Play some or all formations in a game and the highest score wins!

The Play ...
Draw seven Game Rocks from the pouch then turn over a Game Card to reveal a formation. Players then have just sixty seconds to build as much of the formation as they can, in order to score the highest points. If your formation topples, you could end up with no points at all - aargh! Different rocks are worth different points according to their shape and stackability, so it's a good idea to take a gander at the angles and surfaces of your rocks before you start building. Fiddly? It makes stacking irregular ice cubes seem a doddle. And remember, one man's pile of rubble is another man's megalithic ceremonial monument, so some of the easiest-looking formations often turn out to be utter nightmares!

“Safranito” is an extraordinary action-filled game that challenges skillful tactics as well as tactical dexterity.

Like no other game before, “Safranito” is a combination of dexterity and tactics providing the game with a new, superb playing experience. At an Indian spice booth, the players bargain for the precious ingredients they need for their exquisite meals. Thereby, everyone throws their Indian coins face-down onto the bowls depicted on the game board. The players may bluff and push the opponents’ coins aside. A clever coin thrower is able to arrange the coins on the game board in a way that allows him to do both: sell his spices at a high price and purchase cheap spices as well. Eventually, the first player wins who has been able to acquire the spices needed to serve the maharajah his desired meal.

A dexterity dice game consisting of four sets of colored dice one either slides, rolls, or flicks down a stepped surface. Usually one slides the die for better accuracy. After each person has slid their 4 dice, points are scored. You score the die roll times a multiplier of either 1×, 2×, 3×, or 4× depending on which area of the board the die is on. (Dice which land in the 0× region are immediately removed from play.) High scoring rolls are targets for opponents. Four rounds are played and the player with the most points win.