Nekojima Review

boardgamequest.com:

Nekojima is a 1-5 player dexterity game based on the cat islands of Japan from Hachette Board Games which may be played competitively, cooperatively, or solo. While the nekos (cats) are indeed in the game, the central element is carefully balancing electrical poles with brightly-colored string between them without letting the whole infrastructure come tumbling down. While Nekojima indeed looks incredibly colorful and cute, is the game itself something of a house of cards?

The “game” consists of rolling a pair of dice, which will dictate which of the game board’s four quadrants the player must place each electrical pole attached to either side of the string. This combo of two wooden poles connected by a piece of string is called a Denchuu. Then the player blindly pulls a cube out of a bag which will dictate the color of the string between the two poles. The strings vary in length based on their color, with pink/red being the shortest, white being medium, and blue being the longest.

When placing Denchuus, the string may not touch the game board or any other string, and may not be wrapped around the poles. Denchuu poles may be placed on top of existing poles and built atop them. If, while drawing cubes, a player happened to have pulled a black cube, this means a cat must be played. In cooperative games, the player who pulled the cat must hang it by its tail or paw on one of the Denchuu strings, while in a competitive game, the player who pulled the cube must choose another player and they must carefully place the cat without having the whole thing collapse.

There are some other minor variants included in the game (birds nests that limit the height of the Denchuu stacks to two-high, etc.), but that is basically the gist of it. In competitive mode, the player who made the Denchuus collapse is the loser, everyone else the winner; in cooperative mode, there’s a cube-tracker that gives players a measure of how well they’ve done.

Nekojima was one of those games that grabbed