As many of my regular readers know, I’m not really a fan of abstract strategy games.  They’re just not my thing, but every once in a while I come across one that I can’t help but love.  I first played Stomple at the 2010 Chicago Toy and Game Fair and included it in my “ChiTAG picks” article (See HERE).  And now that I’ve had a chance to subject some of my play testers to it, I think it deserves it’s own article complete with great inventor story!

To remind you quickly how to play (if you didn’t read the ChiTAG Picks article), the board is a 7×7 grid of marbles and players use “Stompers” to push the different colored marbles through holes in the board.  On your turn you push down or “stomp” a marble adjacent to your Stomper’s position on the board.  If there is a marble of the same color adjacent to the one you just stomped you must do that one too until there are no marbles of the same color next your stomper.  At anytime you may move to another part of the board by jumping to and stomping a marble that matches the color of your Stomper.  This is particularly useful when you find your Stomper with no marbles around you since you MUST stomp a marble on each turn.  If you can’t stomp a marble on your turn you must remove you Stomper from the board and you’re done for the round.  But if your Stomper is the last one on the board you get 1 point for each marble left and 3 points for special red cat’s eye marbles.

Greg Zima, of GaZima Games, is the inventor of Stomple – although he initially called it “Stomp.”  He came up with the idea of stomping marbles through a board and thought it was a fun, toy-esque concept but the game play didn’t come together right away.  At first he thought of stomping things around a track but really, it just wasn’t right.  So he did what a lot of inventors do when they’re stumped.  He tossed it on the backburner and let it simmer in the back of his brain for a while.  About 18 months later he had the “ah ha!” moment he was waiting for.  The game play was developed in just a couple days and his business partner Stefan Maroudis put together a prototype and they play tested it until they thought it was pretty close to perfect. (See pic of prototype above, courtesy of Greg Zima)

Stomple is manufactured by Spin Master and first time the game was shown to them, they weren’t interested because they weren’t doing games.  The second time, however, was a totally different story.  In Greg’s words:

Stefan and I were at the licensing show and we always bring a couple of games with us even if we don’t have meetings – just in case.  We called Ben Dermer (Spin Master) and asked him if we could meet and he said ‘meet me in 5 minutes’ and we literally had to run, in our suits and dress shoes, across the conference center all the way up do Ben’s room — it had to have been about a mile!  When we got there we were out of breath, but we showed him the game.  He LOVED it and pretty much optioned it on the spot!

Fast-forward to now, Stomple was just named one of the Mensa Select award winners earlier this spring, which is extremely cool!  I asked Greg if he found it difficult to license an abstract strategy game and he admitted that earlier on they tried to add some faces to the marbles to give it a theme and some artwork, but he said,

“Really you just have to remind [inventor relations people] that there are other very successful abstract strategy games out there like Tetris and Blokus.  But it helped that our game also incorporated the toy-esque stomping.”

I agree that the stomp is super-satisfying to the point that I kind of don’t mind if I’m losing because it’s so enjoyable to stomp marbles on every turn.  I also like that the games are quick so if I happen to lose, we can play again right and way and I can regain my position as supreme stomper.

Stomple Stats:

• ~$30 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and many others
• 2-5 Players
• ~5 minutes per round
• Ages 8 and Up

ChiTag was over more than a week ago, and I’ve yet to do a recap but it’s because I have to PLAY the games I found there before I review them to make sure I actually like them.  (duh)  This year there were TONS of games to play and buy at the open-to-the-public fair on Chicago’s Navy Pier and I covered a bunch of them in the preview article and I’ve also written articles about many of the games like Word on the Street, Triviathon, Blurt and Backseat Drawing.  But there were two new games that stood out when I made my rounds.

The first game embodies WHY to go to the fair.  The game is Eleminis and it’s the first game from a company called Smileypop.  The inventor, his family and friends were working the booth teaching people how to play the easy-to-learn card game and selling it to anyone interested in taking a copy home.  This kind of product is definitely going to be hard to find in stores and I often don’t review games with distribution as small as theirs because it’s too hard for you, my wonderful readers, to find and buy.  And it’s just mean for me to say “it’s awesome, but good luck finding one!”

In Eleminis the goal is to collect 5 different Elimini (Plant, Air, Water, Rock and Fire). Every player can have up to 5 cards in front of them at a time and on your turn you draw a card and place an Elemini in a blank space in front of you, or you can replace one of your own or one of your opponent’s Eleminis.   Each Elemini card can replace 2 other Eleminis and these icons are shown in the corner of the card.  This allows you to replace one of your own eleminis if you have a duplicate or you can make trouble for your opponents and create duplicates in their set of cards by replacing one of their eleminis.  In the deck there are also cards that allow you to move a card from one player to another, discard Eleminis and swap Eleminis which keeps things interesting.  Then there are there are Stars which are wild Eleminis and the black sheep of the family, the Trash which you need to remove from your hand before you win.  The game takes less than a minute to learn and plays well with 3-5 players (although I didn’t have a chance to test it with more than 5, I can say it wasn’t my fave with just 2 players.)

The other game I played A LOT at the fair is a game from a large manufacturer you may have heard of, Spin Master.  They got back into the world of games after buying some of Imagination Entertainment’s products and adding some new stuff to their portfolio including this new game called Stomple.  It’s very easy abstract strategy and the goal is to be the last player to have their Stomper on the board.  The board is a 7×7 grid of marbles and players use Stompers to push these different colored marbles through the holes the marbles sit in.  On your turn you push down or “stomp” a marble adjacent to your Stomper’s position on the board.  If there is a marble of the same color adjacent to the one you just stomped you must do that one too until there are no marbles of the same color next your stomper.  At anytime you may move to another part of the board by jumping to and stomping a marble that matches the color of your Stomper.  This is particularly useful when you find your Stomper with no marbles nearby since you MUST stomp a marble on each turn.  If you can’t stomp a marble on your turn you must remove you Stomper from the board and you’re done for the round.  But if your Stomper is the last one on the board you get 1 point for each marble left and 3 points for special red cat’s eye marbles.  You can play by counting rounds won or play to a certain total, either way it’s quick and very satisfying to stomp stuff!

Both of these games are quick to learn and play which makes them fun to play both at game fairs and at home.  And a quick thanks to Greg Zima, inventor of Stomple and Matt Laird, inventor of Eleminis for showing me their games at the fair!

Eleminis Stats:
~$11 at Amazon
2-8 Players (not great with 2 players)
~5-10 minutes per round
Ages 7 and Up

Stomple Stats:
~$30 at Amazon now and Barnes & Noble soon
2-4 Players
~5 minutes per round
Ages 8 and Up

I think that games should look fun to play.  It’s much easier to convince a newbie to play a game if looks fun – granted it should also be fun, but I think that almost goes without saying.

Today’s game review is on Gobblet Gobblers.  It’s the colorful, cute version of the abstract strategy game Gobblet which has been a success for Blue Orange games for a couple of years now.  Invented by Blue Orange’s founder Thierry Denoual, the game is easy to play and learn but takes a bit of time to master. The wooden game consists of 6 (2 small, 2 medium and 2 large) blue Gobblers, 6 orange Gobblers and a playing grid.  On each turn a player can place a Gobbler in a space or move a Gobbler to another space and larger Gobblers can cover up either player’s smaller Gobblers.  A player wins when they get three in a row; it’s simple enough!

Gobblet Gobblers is really like an addictive and more complex game of tic-tac-toe.  You need to think about moves ahead but also remember what’s hiding underneath each of the Gobblers.  At the beginning you will make some stupid moves but the learning curve is very quick so you won’t have that “wow am I dumb” feeling for more than a game or two.  And trust me, that feeling just makes you want to have an immediate rematch, and since the games only take about 2-5 minutes each it’s easy to demand one – or six.

Because it is an offshoot of the schoolroom classic tic-tac-toe, it’s great for kids and parents to play together.  The manufacturer says it’s for ages 5 and up and while I didn’t test it with a kid that young, I’m pretty certain that a 5 year old would enjoy it – especially with the cute faces and funny felt hair that makes Gobblet Gobblers so much cuter than it’s parent game Gobblet.

Gobblet Gobblers Stats:
~$19 at Target, Borders, Amazon.com, local Mom & Pop stores
2 Players
2-5 Minutes
Ages 5 and up

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve got a degree in industrial design and ending up in the game industry was somewhat a fluke.  I needed a job, they were the only ones hiring after 9/11 so voilà -  “toy/game inventor Kim.”

Now if you don’t know what an industrial designer is, consider what a graphic designer does for 2D designs; industrial designers do that for 3D products like cars, electronics, household goods, furniture and the list goes on.  Essentially it means that I have a weakness for beautifully designed products.  And the sad truth is that I don’t come across much in the game aisle that makes me drool, so when I opened the Pentago box it was like I could hear the design angels singing.  It’s BEAUTIFUL.

I purchased mine at Target so it’s the plastic version of the game (as seen in the photo here).  I know there are wooden versions but I am so satisfied/enamored with my mass-market copy.  The plastic feels nice, the moving parts are smooth, the marbles are real marbles – not cheap plastic things.  It’s so amazing that I’ve been raving about it since I opened the box.

The game is simple: you need to get 5 of your colored marbles in a row.  The catch is, on each turn you must place a marble on the board (or move a marble) AND rotate one of the quadrants ninety degrees.  The movement of the quadrants is so fluid.  It slides out and rotate with such ease I had to stop the first game we played to take a closer look at it’s manufacturing.  And then to boot it comes with a nice plastic clip on cover that holds the marbles in place if you decide to drag it with you somewhere and don’t want the fuss of a big box.

The game itself definitely falls into the “abstract strategy” category, but it’s so simple to learn and satisfying to play that it’s really enjoyable.  It was invented by Tomas Flodén in Sweden and in 2006 it received the Mensa Select Award, but don’t let that deter you non-strategy game people from trying this one out.

As a side note here – Pentago has been around for a little while (2004-ish) but just showed up in my Target now.  It’s been on my “to purchase list” but as I am not a huge fan of abstract strategy games it wasn’t purchased until I saw it on the shelf there and I felt guilty that it was not already in my collection.  Points to the Target game buyer for snatching this one up; it’s not often that we see something like this amongst the boxes and boxes Twister, Clue and Monopoly games but it truly is a treasure.

Pentago Stats:
~$20 at Target, Amazon.com
2 Players
3-30 Minutes (30 minutes seems really high…but this is what it said on the box.  None of my games have been anywhere near that long, but I’m still working on mastering this game.)
Ages 6 and up