Looking for a quick and fast game that is great fun for the family? Blockers: The Stacking Game was a very nice surprise, and my friends and I really enjoyed playing the game. Because of how simple it was to learn and teach, I decided not to do a rulebook review. Just know that the rulebook was very nice, and even had a section that detailed some alternate rules! It also addressed color blindness with a variant, which was quite thoughtful.

How to play

On their turn, each player has 1 minute to complete as many structures as possible. They draw a card from the top of the deck, and try to complete it. This is done by getting the correct blocks in the correct configuration. Be careful, the colors have to match as well. Upon completing it, they score the points on that card and draw another card to complete. Players also have the option to skip a card (and lose a point). This continues until time is up, at which point the next player goes. The player with the most points wins.

Difficulty and Variance

Overall, the cards had a lot of variety, and this was great for replay-ability. That being said, we felt that there could have been some trickier structures included in the game. Most of the structures felt pretty easy to complete, so it felt like the game was more about speed rather than meticulous balancing. That’s not necessarily a knock on the game, but it something you should think about before picking it up. My friends enjoyed creating our own structures and challenging each-other to complete our own creations:

The toughest structure in the whole game was probably “Whose idea was this?” and our group had a fun time seeing who could do it the fastest:

Thoughts on the game

I thought that this was an excellent dexterity game. There is practically 0 set up time. It’s also an extremely a fast game: one 3 player game takes 3 minutes. Blockers is portable, meaning that I could take it with me for some fast fun on a short trip. It’s approachable to children and adults. Personally, my strategy was to go as fast as possible. This hurt me later on as I would realize that I used the wrong color blocks after finishing my structure and would have to repeat the process. One of my friends had a lot of success going slowly, but making sure that their structure was always correct. They would have won had not run out of time on their last structure, ha!

My friends also thought that it was a fun game. One mentioned that this would be fun to play while drunk, as it would increase the difficulty of the game. Another thing we thought about was how expandable the base game is: more pieces, different rules, and different configurations could easily be added on in the future. One thing in particular that stood out was the texture of the blocks. Since our copy is a prototype, we aren’t sure if this would change, but the current texture of the blocks made it easier to create cool structures as there was more friction between the surfaces.

The idea of creating my own structures also highly appealed to me. While technically not in the rulebook, I think it would be awesome to make my own set of structures on blank official cards and challenge my friends to make them. This is what we ended up doing after the game was over, and it kept us entertained for a long time. For this reason, the lack of difficulty was not a huge concern for me. I would be interested in knowing how the points per structure are calculated: it seemed to be a combination of the number of levels as well as the number of blocks used in a given structure.

Anyway, this is a great game, and it is relatively affordable too! It is on Kickstarter from a first-time creator, so please go support them and their work! Link HERE:

What are your favorite dexterity games? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for reading!