Just plain fun: Three great Oink games
Plus three more from iconic Japanese publisher Oink.
Once you’ve been in the board game hobby long enough, you tend to find publishers whose tastes sort of align with your own. Maybe not on every game they publish, but on some. Maybe you’re big into GMT Games and their war games. Maybe you like the focused asymmetry leaned into with Leder Games. Maybe Gamewright really does have the best family-friendly games. There are so many publishers out there carving out a niche.
One of the first publishers I really found myself delighted by was Oink Games, the Japanese publisher behind celebrated games like Deep Sea Adventure and Scout. Not every game they release is a runaway success, but they consistently release games that pack fun into a small, stylish box.
These three games pack the fun in better than most. They’re clever, innovative, and often hilarious. (I love a game that makes me laugh.)
Rafter Five
I love dexterity games. I am not particularly good at them. This is an established fact here at Don’t Eat the Meeples. Rafter Five is exactly that — a game I love at which I’m not particularly good. In this small-box dexterity game, you’re tasked with getting all of your treasure chests on a raft, presumably because you’re buccaneers whose ship has been sunk.
Each turn, you’ll expand the raft (which is built atop the game board) by placing a new plank on top of the game box. (Games that use the box in the game are so cool. I’m biased.) These aren’t real planks; they’re narrow cards that are just a bit difficult to work with. When you place a plank, you have to move one of the raft’s denizens on top and place a treasure chest, too.
Rafter Five starts fairly simple, fairly approachable — but it gets significantly more difficult as it goes forward, and you’ll find yourself (or at least I found myself) placing things in such a way that I thought I’d make things more difficult for my opponents. Instead, I only made things more difficult for myself.
Designed by Mashiu and Jun Sasaki.
Hey Yo
Of all the Oink games in my collection, none of them really come close to doing what Hey Yo does. It harnesses the idea of a rhythm game — a common mechanism in video games, but not one we really have seen in board games with any frequency. (Is there a good rhythm game out there aside from Hey Yo? Let me know if I’ve missed one!) That rhythm game is turned into a card game in which you’re playing to the beat and trying to match symbols on two lines. You score points for symbols on the lines in unbroken chains, so long as you have a scoring symbol visible.
This is the sort of game that would be exceedingly simple on its own, but with the demands of a real-time, rhythm-based game, you’ll find yourself with far less time than you realized, especially if the person playing before you does something unexpected.
The whole experience takes minutes at most. The stress won’t last long, but it’s sure fun while it lasts.
Designed by Takashi Saito.
Make the Difference
This is a game that shouldn’t work. “Spot the difference, but you get to make it yourself” was my quick summary in my rough-rough draft (I usually sketch out an outline with a bullet point for every game I want to discuss.) That’s a game that has no business being good fun. It’s easy to think about some of the ways you could accomplish it, but there’s a twist that really makes this game sing. Before that twist, the game gives you the proper tools: A marker that’s precisely as thick as the lines being drawn is paired with some nicely printed sheets with six different line drawings available. You’ll use that marker to draw five lines on your sheet, altering the drawing in some way you hope is difficult to find — but not too difficult, because you don’t get points for small changes that go unnoticed. After everyone finishes altering their drawings, you’ll put a sheet in the middle for everyone to investigate.
The twist: There’s a plastic sheet you put over the card once it’s drawn. As a result, it’s hard to see exactly what lines have been drawn, as everything is rendered ever-so-slightly fuzzy. That small difficulty surprised me how much it altered the game, but it’s what makes it work. I think.
Designed by Shintaro Ono
Three more fun Oink games
Nine Tiles Panic is a fast-paced tile-placement game in which you’re trying to meet randomized goals. Designed by Jean-Claude Pellin and Jens Merkl.
Town 77 is a bit of a Sudoku-like puzzle game in which you’re arranging houses in a grid. Designed by Christoph Cantlzer and Anja Wrede.
A Fake Artist Goes to New York is my type of social deduction game — the stakes are low. Each player but one (the ‘fake artist’) gets the same word, and the ‘real artists’ have to find the fake by drawing something related to that word. Designed by Jun Sasaki.
I’ve got some more Oink games that fit here, but you’re going to have to wait for next week. (That’s my plan, at least. We’ll see.)
Thank you, dear reader, for sticking around to the end. I hope the week’s found you well. We drove a lot over the last two weeks, and that’s meant that the last few posts have been a little less intensive. Maybe that’s just the right thing for the summer. Anyway, I played a lot of games during my vacation, and I’m excited to talk more about those over the coming weeks and months.
Next week: Climbing and shedding games!