Tinderblox is a hilariously little dexterity game about assembling a campfire. I was never an eagle scout (or any type of scout) but I am fairly certain this game is hyper realistic and authentically captures the experience of building a fire bit by bit. With tweezers of course.
To setup the game, you place a trio of the long wooden pieces (my eaglet instincts tell me these are firewood) on a card. That’s the campfire. On your turn, draw the top card of the deck. It will show a configuration of blocks that you have to put onto the existing fire without knocking anything over. Sometimes, the card tells you to use your off-hand. Once you’ve placed your blocks onto the fire, it is the next player’s turn. Simple as.
Piece by piece, you’re building this fire– not just the logs, but also the blocky fire and the blocky embers, too. Eventually, you’ve cobbled together malformed pixel art rendered somewhere in the realm of 16×16. There’s a lot of charm to the game’s art, how its own rounded edges and smoothness compliments the simplicity of the hefty wooden components.
I appreciate the cleanness of the design, too. The cards themselves don’t ask you to do anything impossible or go out of their way to create comedy. They say exactly what to put in the fire and what hand to do it with. If you can’t put the red flame block on the log block, that’s the ballgame. There’s no “aw man I pulled an impossible one!” There are some easier instructions and some harder ones, but there’s not variety for variety’s sake. It is a small game, it stays small. There are three distinct building blocks and two of them (the fire and the ember, as I’ve been calling them) are identical except for color.
Playing this with my little brother for whom dexterity games are his Super Bowl, our campfire grew and grew. Each additional placement was made with a more incredulous “okay that’s impossible now, good luck, I win.” Because the fire is ideally only as wide as it in the beginning (especially so in the two player game), Tinderblox can only expand upward. If everyone is on their A game, you necessarily build a skyscraper of shaky wood and flame.
Think the last couple turns of your favorite dexterity game, where every placement is being made on a razors edge. The thing has gotten as narrow as it’s gonna get so there’s nowhere to go but up. In Tinderblox, rendering a voxel campfire gets to that level of quivering madness by turn four or five.
Playing with more players adds an extra satisfying twist, too. Unlike dexterity classics where a big tower falls over and that’s it– if someone is eliminated from the fire collapsing, play simply continues. In the universe of Tinderblox, I imagine the dejected camper sulking off in shame while others, not even noticing their campsite aflame, toss in more firewood. If everything falls and the fire is now sprawled out horizontally, though, that gives more real estate for the surviving players to build. For a silly game about tweezers-and-stacking, it’s… elegant. The game is, at most, ten minutes long, so the player elimination does not leave a sour taste in my mouth. At two players, the game can be set up and played in under five minutes easily.
The Storm Edition, which is what my local library had available, boasts waterproof components (they feel like normal cards and pieces, to me) as well as an additional mini-expansion. Storm cards get shuffled into the deck which, when drawn, require the active player to place some tinier plastic rain cubes on the fire. Maybe this is the placebo affecting me, but the rain cubes sure felt more slippery. As more storm cards are pulled, more rain must be heaped onto the fire at once. It is not a necessary addition, but it does add another pop of color to the abstract collage that is your campfire– so why not use it?
I’m happy and satisfied with Tinderblox crossing my path when it did. Dexterity games are such easy sells, often hamstringed by their propensity to be, uh, giant pieces of wood. (I’m looking at you, Crokinole.) More dexterity games ought to fit in your pocket. Tinderblox has my interest piqued to check out other work by Rob Sparks and Alley Cat Games. Barbecubes looks right up my alley, with an even more straightforwardly pixel aesthetic. I’ll have to pick that up sometime. Until then, I’ll be practicing some scout safety and keeping this fire contained. Promise.
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