Board Game Reviews: Ubongo
Written by Cearbhail on April 14th, 2011Ubongo is fast. It’s pretty. It’s completely lacking in strategy and (almost completely) in decisions. And it’s fun. It’s a riot. You should definitely give it a try, if you get the chance.
There’s supposedly a theme in this board game, somewhere (Ubongo meaning “head” or “brain” in swahili, or so I recall), of some sort of festival for rain or harvest. My edition is in german, but I can safely say that any theme is pasted on. This is essentially cardboard tetris.
Well, not really tetris: you’re not filing up horizontal lines with tiles that are given you in random aorder and trying to make the tiles disappear. But it’s pretty close to that: At the start of each round, each player picks up a puzzle board and tries, within the period of the sandtimer (45-60 seconds), to fill up the white space with a set of tetris-like pieces (everyone’s set is identical). What pieces you have to use is indicated by a die roll and a unique chart that is printed on each board. When you finish your puzzle, you yell out (or maybe just say it out loud, if you’re the shy type) “Ubongo!” and grab a few shiny rocks. The first person to finish his puzzle has more choices in picking up shiny rocks, but everyone always picks up two. The winner is the player that has the most rocks of a single color after nine rounds of puzzle-solving.
As you can see, it’s dead simple. Games rarely take more than half an hour, regardless of player count. It’s a game where the number of players at the table hardly matters, since the meat of the gameplay is pretty much solitaire (each with his own puzzle), and makes one wonder why they didn’t include piece sets for 5 and 6 players as well (with a few extra puzzle boards along with it).
Even if each player is dealing with this own particular situation, it doesn’t really feel like multiplayer solitaire. The shouting of “ubongo” and the pressure to solve it faster than other players make the game more lively; if you’re the last one left that hasn’t solved his puzzle, you can feel the other players stare at your direction even if you don’t raise your eyes from your board. Shouting out countdowns is fun, too.
The obvious complaint to make about this board game is the scoring system: it’s most definitely pasted on the rest of the game, and worse, it’s unfair. A player can solve all the puzzles given to him and still lose to another player that. I usually play with a set collection variant, that while still feels pasted on is a little more fair towards the endresult (I should note that Ubongo extreme’s scoring also feels artificial). This being such a quick and somewhat mindless (or at least completely lacking in brainburny moments), it’s not a horrible fault that kills the board game, as it would with most board games.
This board game is quite newbie friendly. Rules explanation should take less than 5 minutes, and is probably acessible even to children 6+, if you get a bigger sandtimer and are more lax on the competition aspect (they will probably enjoy the puzzle part by itself). Still, like many puzzle games/activities, one gets clearly better with more experience, a sort of muscle one exercizes over and over, unable to transfer any of his experience to a new player. But, not being the strategy title, it’s still pretty fun if you do badly (or, perhaps I should say, a person’s enjoyment doesn’t depend at all on his performance in the game, unlike what happens sometimes in a few deeper games)
After around a dozen plays, I must say this boad game does become a little on the easy side (something I heard does not happen so quickly with Ubongo Extreme, but having played it only twice I cannot say for myself). You will definitely finish most puzzles, even on the “hard” side of the board (the one that requires four pieces instead of three), but still you’ll get stumped from time to time. In those moments, you will get stressed out and tense, and your opponents will all be looking at you as you helplessly try to solve the puzzle. When the timer runs out, you’ll scream “it’s impossible!”, and toss the board back in the box, just as one opponent decides to pick it up and manages to solve it in five seconds. For those moments, the board game remains entertaining, even after you’ve become really good at it.
This board game is very nicely produced. The publisher, KOSMOS, has wisely picked up on the mainstream appeal of the game, and didn’t save any pennies in the production values: the cover and the graphics are colorful, the pieces are nice and sturdy, and even the (almost irrelevant) player pawns look quite nice. The simple gameplay and nice look has paid off: Ubongo is a best-selling board game, having spawned a whole bunch of spin-offs, with travel editions (that appear quite limited in replay value, from the pictures I’ve seen online), hexagonal “Extreme” editions (that are tougher, but still too similar to the original to be worth owning both of them) and now even a 3D edition, with chunky blocks to be placed on top of each other in some parts. I’ve even bought a “duel” version, in which players try to solve the same puzzle (on different boards, of course) and has a duel-type scoring that at last won’t be tacked-on or random. Normal ubongo is fine with two players, but considering it’s usually played to “fill holes” between matches of more “serious” games, a two-player variant with more tension will probably be welcome.
Like it or not, we’ll see a bunch more of ubongo in the future. I’m not the biggest fan of the series, but I’m usually willing to play, specially if I have non-gamers over. I give it a 7/10.
Click here to order Ubongo from Amazon
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