RHINO HERO

Designer: Scott Frisco & Steven Strumpf | Publisher: Haba

The delightfully chunky wooden blocks of Jenga have graced the throne of the dexterity game kingdom for a long time. Then along came the plastic flimsy cards and rhino meeple of Rhino Hero

and, while may not have dethroned it, certainly made its crown a little less secure.

Unlike in Jenga,

where you remove pieces of the towers waiting for the inevitable collapse, in Rhino Hero,

you build a tower instead, waiting for your wobbly construction to also end up in the eventual catastrophe. You begin with a card base showing the position of the walls

(bent cards), which form the vertical elements for the next floor to be played from the player’s hand. Each floor also comes with an UNOstyle power, making other players skip a turn, or reverse play order and so on, adding a bit of the strategic flavour to the gameplay. The trickiest power is moving a rhino meeple from one floor to another. As soon as you have at least a couple of floors made up of walls that do everything but bent at the required right angles and the centre weight of the tower is offset but the haphazardness of the construction, doing anything to the tower – even breathing too close to it – can cause the collapse. This makes moving rhino meeple from one shaky floor to another a particularly risky affair.

Seeing an unavoidably leaning tower of cards rise off the table and then inevitable topple, is an immense delight. Take it from someone who played game for a year before bothering to read the rules – it is enjoyable whether you play it wrong or right, played with children or with copious amounts of alcohol. No matter what, the tower will fall, the joy will be had, Rhino Hero will save the party.

ALEXANDRA SONECHKINA