A perfect balancing act

Designer: Big Potato | Publisher: Big Potato

Big Potato’s first real foray into the world of hobby games, and adventure games, contains every bit as much of the company’s character as you’d expect. It’s silly, funny, and worth having a party for. Inside a beautiful box are three adventures, some plastic pieces of three varieties, a kind of tabletop shuffleboard, and three adventures, individually packaged up.

The mechanics of the game are straightforward – it wouldn’t be a Big Potato game if you couldn’t learn it in five minutes after all – turn a card from the adventure, read it out and choose your own path at the bottom of the card. Unless the narrative is broken up with an event symbol (or you choose one), in which case, it’s challenge time. This can be one of the three standard games, which are puck push (flick a puck up the board, landing it in the designated area), item search (find the right shaped pieces in the bag to match those on the card) or shape sort (arrange fragments to make a matching shape on the card), or a mini game. These mini games can literally be anything you can think of with a card and the various things in the box – you might have to pass a card around your body while balancing a peril piece on it, have someone else throw a card towards you for you to bat it away with one hand, or drop it perfectly through a circle made with someone else’s fingers and thumbs from a height.