Grabble

• Designer:  Naoki Fukuda
• Publisher: CMYK
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 6+
• Time: 5 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Here’s how it works: you have a box of gloriously mismatched pieces from games that never existed—hogs, bananas, traffic cones, dice! On the count of 3-2-1-GO, everyone plunges a hand into the box, grabbing pieces as fast as they can, one at a time, and dropping them into their cup. The moment someone’s cup is full, they snatch the huge pawn and count down 5-4-3-2-1-STOP! Last player to slap the table pays them a piece.

Then comes the showdown. Players take turns calling out a piece from their stash and tossing it back in the box. Got one too? Toss it back in. Don’t have it? You’re OUT.

Last player standing wins! 

…and immediately demands a rematch.

Umm, so normally I put the publisher blurb above the break as a teaser.  In this case, the game is so simple rules-wise that the entire game explanation is pretty much complete!  Grabble is a raucous game of furious collecting and then a rapid-fire pseudo trick-taking game to determine the winner.

The fakey game pieces used here are just great.  You get dice, bananas, pigs, meeples, traffic cones, letters, etc.  Most of them come in two different sizes.  Each player also gets a sweet little bucket to collect their bits.

The first half of the game is a battle royale free-for-all with players jostling for the pieces they want.  If hands and fingers can get in a pushing match, they will here.  Everything must be done as quick as possible as there is an advantage to declaring yourself done first.  Not only do you trigger the end of the round, you will end up getting one extra piece (from the slowest person to stop) and you will also get to go first in the second phase.

As you’re grabbing things – it happens so fast that there’s not a lot of time to think. Do you just plunge in and take the first thing you can get your fingers around?  Do you go for a wide breadth of different types?  Do you seek out the smaller ones to allow you to fit more things into your pail?  Do you instead try to corner the market on something?  Whatever you decide, do it quick because you’re only gonna have like 15 seconds before the phase ends.

Though others don’t agree with me, I believe the second half of the game to be a trick-taking game.  The player who took the pawn to end the collection phase leads first.  They choose any object from their collection and discard it.  Everyone else MUST follow this lead with a similar object or they are eliminated.  The next remaining player clockwise leads the next “trick”.  Continue until only one person is left.  That person wins!  

The whole game takes maybe 5 minutes.  Honestly, more like 2. It’s just so rapid fire – always filled with laughs, groans and the occasional curse word.  The whole thing is so fast, that assuredly you’ll end up playing more than one game.  For me, this is where the real beauty of the game comes in – now you’re playing Meta-Grabble.

In the last game, the first three people all led their trick with Bananas. This ended up eliminating half the table.  In the next game, will there be a furious fight for the fruit?  Is that what everyone wants?  Or will someone try to instead corner the market on something else and lead a cone to start out – which half the table ignored in their rush to get the bananas?  Either way, it’ll be done in a minute or two and you’ll be playing again, now with two games of history to keep in your mind.

Each game is filled with laughs and surprises, and this is surely going to be one of my favorite games of the year.  This is now the third version of the game that I’ve played (MADA HAiLE and Nuts-a-Go-Go being the other two) –  but this is the first one that will be readily available for me to acquire.  I would recommend that you run, not walk, to your favorite online store (or CMYK site) to grab one now before you’ll be eliminated in the game of life when your friend leads with his copy and you don’t have one to match.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!  Dale Yu, John P
• I like it.
• Neutral.
• Not for me…