Base price: $7.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: ~10 minutes.
BGG | Board Game Atlas
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of Blob Lobber was provided by Publisher Services Inc..
Another of the PSI pack games! I think I tried this one briefly at Gen Con, as well. Let’s dig right in.
In Blob Lobber, you’re bloblin’ lobs or lombing blobs or bombing blobs? One of those. Flip cards to explode blobs, but don’t lob a bomb towards your own blobs! Keep your blobs unbombed or something. They should have just given Bob Loblaw design credits, honestly. Will you be able to take the most blobs?
Contents
Setup
Setup isn’t too bad. Give each player a player marker:
Then flip one of the blobs into the center:
If it’s a Toxic Blob, remove it; otherwise, use another blob to space the Blob Queens one card length from the center. Here’s the Toxic Blob and the Queens:
You’ll notice the Queens match the Player Markers; that’s your team’s color. Once you’re ready, well, start playing!
Gameplay
In Blob Lobber, you and other players are trying to stop a blob incursion the only way you know how: by doing explosions on them. You might want to talk to the Slap It! folks; they seem to be a bit nicer about it. Either way, explode the most blobs, and you win!
On your turn, take a card and flip it onto the table. It has to flip over at least once for it to count. If it lands blobs-up, it stays there; nothing happens. If it lands bomb-side up, you’ve caused an explosion! If that explosion covers a blob, you exploded that card! Take it and add it to your score pile. If it slides under one, well, you exploded, but you didn’t explode that blob. Either way, the explosion stays. If you touch the Toxic Blob (either you play the blob or your blob slides into the blob), remove the card touching the Toxic Blob (either over or under).
Once the deck is depleted, every player checks their score pile:
- Your color blobs are worth negative points.
- Other players’ color blobs are worth positive points.
- Small Blobs are worth 1 point.
- Queen Blobs are worth 2 points.
The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Not really that many; I guess you get to lob more blobs? That’s really about it.
Strategy
There isn’t … really any. It’s a pure dexterity game. I suppose you might try to check what the blobs on your card are so that you can lob blobs of other players’ colors together to try and disincentivize them lobbing towards there (or avoiding big pockets of your color), but that seems like too much effort for what’s ultimately a super light, super fast dexterity game, maybe?
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I do love dexterity games … on principle. Throwing cards is a lot of fun, also; I played Monstrous a while back and it was a very good one. I wish there were more throwing and less flipping, though.
Mehs
- It’s difficult to get everything back into the box. That’s just part of the tuckbox construction, I guess? It’s a bit frustrating.
- I guess you need to practice? It’s not a common enough thing that people would be good at it, so start lucky and try to get better?
Cons
- The flipping is kind of unsatisfying. The cards aren’t heavy enough for the game to really … work? I’ve spent a fair bit of time with it and I have yet to develop any system besides, “flip hard; hope for the best”.
- This is gonna depend a lot on your table texture. This works a bit better if you have a tablecloth or something on it that increases friction; if you don’t, the cards slide all over the place and there’s no real way to do anything else about it. Which can be a bummer.
- There’s just not much to it, and I don’t enjoy what it has, unfortunately. It’s probably totally fine as a game for young kids, but, there are other games that do throwing cards (Monstrous, for instance) or flipping stuff (Flip Ships, Mars Open) better with more of a production. I guess it’s not the worst for $7, but, it’s hard to get too enthused about it. I think where Monstrous succeeds is that it has abilities and player powers to mitigate the luck (and you’re not trying to flip the cards, an incredibly not-aerodynamic maneuver), whereas this is just … can you get lucky and flip the card. It’s an interesting mechanic, but, it feels like more of a mechanic and less like a game.
Overall: 3.5 / 10
Overall, Blob Lobber is … well, I can’t like every dexterity game, right? Like I said, it’s just a bit unsatisfying to play, you know? If you were trying to frisbee the cards, maybe, but unless you have a prodigy moment of some kind, it’s very difficult to get a consistent playstyle down. It doesn’t really inspire me in a way that makes me want to keep it in my collection, but that’s okay; can’t like them all. I think we’ve seen similar mechanics implemented in other games, though, but they’re not usually the whole game. Fireworks, for instance, relies on flipping something to make progress, but you’re not flipping cards; you’re dumping a die to flip tiles and then playing a tile-laying game with them. I think the limited scope is disappointing, a bit. But, like I said, every game can’t be for everyone; this might be a decent stocking stuffer for newer gamers or a perfect game to play if you don’t mind the cards going everywhere. It’s just not a game that I’m particularly enthused about. Oh well.
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