Jenga, Remixed

Remember when going to bars was a thing we could do? And some of those bars had giant Jenga sets you could play with? Jenga can be fun under the right circumstances, but it's hardly the game of choice for a bunch of true gamers getting together for an evening, right? But what if, like, strategic Jenga were a thing? That's the niche that the three designers of Stacked -- Sean Brown, LeAnn Phillips, and Tim Phillips -- seemed to be trying to fill.

Stacked comes with a supply of mostly Tetris-style blocks. The "cubes" of which the blocks are formed are sort of devilish in that they're thinner in one dimension than the other, making for an increasingly unstable tower as you stack them.

There are three different games in Stacked, three different rules sets for the blocks and their accompanying deck of cards. One is essentially a fusion of a trick-taking game with Jenga. Each card shows one of the game's block pieces. In a round, each player must add a block to the tower, the one shown on the card they played. But the winner of the trick instead forces an opponent to add their block to the stack, avoiding the risk of toppling the tower and losing half the points they've earned. You play as many games as it takes to reach an agreed-upon point total.

It's debatable whether anyone really needed there to be "more to Jenga." But assuming you're on board, I don't think Stacked quite fulfills the promise of adding any meaningful strategy. There are enough "suits" (block colors) that when you're working with a limited 7-card hand, you often don't have a choice (or much of a choice) in following suit as required. (That's pretty much how trick-taking games work.) If you rarely have a choice, then you're basically just playing regular Jenga... albeit one with extra steps in the rules.

As I said, there are two other rules sets here. One is "draw a card, play the piece shown," the other is a "HORSE"-like game where each player has to match the shape or color of the previously played piece when adding a new one. I didn't play either of these versions, so there is more to experience in Stacked than I actually did. To be fair, then, my review should be considered "incomplete."

Still, I think I've seen enough here to say that this is basically as fun as Jenga -- little more, little less. I'm lukewarm. Call it a C+? Maybe a B- when you catch me in the right mood for this sort of thing? If you like manual dexterity games a lot, this one might be worth adding to your collection.