Base price: $23.
2 – 5 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 3
The other best part of PAX Unplugged is that the Oink Games booth is back, usually with all their fresh new stuff from Essen! That’s always exciting; they’re one of my favorite publishers. With an entire new swath of options, well, we have a lot more games to try and talk about! I’ll be going through them over the next few weeks / months / a while, so why not check it out! There’s no better way to celebrate Christmas than dealing with ghosts, so, first up is DroPolter!
In DroPolter, the worst has happened! The ghosts under your bed are getting restless and there are … so many of them. You’ll have to get your lucky charms in check if you want to fend them off! Just make sure you don’t drop the wrong stuff, or otherwise you might be running into problems that will only get spookier. Can you stop the haunting under your bed? Or do you not stand a ghost of a chance?
Contents
Setup
This one’s actually surprisingly simple. Shuffle the theme cards:
Then, give each player a set of the lucky charms:
Set the ghost piece and the bells aside, near the center of the play area:
You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
It’s actually easier to play DroPolter than it is to set it up, which is saying something. Before a round starts, every player takes their set of lucky charms (and any bells they have) and shakes them up in their hands. Every player chooses a hand to keep all the items in, and keeps that hand closed and face-down. They can’t look at it yet.
The start player for the round flips a card and the round starts! On the card is one or more items; using only that hand, the player must drop the correct items (no more, no less). You can’t put the ring on your finger or use your other hand. If you drop any incorrect items, you have to take everything back, shake it up again, and start over. If you drop any bells, you have to start over, but the bell is returned to the center pile.
Once you’ve dropped only the correct items, you can grab the ghost, end the round, and claim a bell! The player who does is the new start player, and the next round starts. First player to have five bells in hand wins!
Player Count Differences
Don’t sweat player count differences for this one. Every round plays basically exactly the same, since you’re just focusing on yourself and you can’t play aggressively against other players. Assuming all players are about the same “skill” level, though, the game will take longer with more people since, pigeonhole principle), there are more bells that can be claimed before any player gets to five. In reality, there will probably be one player who’s playing a bit better or having a bit more luck, but that’s likely to occur no matter the player count. Wouldn’t say I have a huge player count preference, as a result; I think it’s a very silly game so I’m always excited to show it to more people, though with more people shaking more bells it does get increasingly jingly at higher player counts.
Strategy
- This is another one of those games where strategy advice will only get you so far. You’re just kind of dropping stuff skillfully. There’s some planning and forethought and things to avoid that you should definitely keep track of as you’re spinning things up and getting started, but largely if you’re trying to invest in the strategy of it all, you’re probably not going to be moving fast enough to actually win rounds outright. Embrace the chaos, my friends.
- The key is almost always going to be your biggest problem. It’s tiny and a weird shape. That will almost always mess you up, as it will either fall out at the wrong time or it will get blocked behind something else (like bells, annoyingly) which will mess you up even further. I usually try to lock it down one way or the other out of the gate.
- Watch out for the ring getting around the key or any bells. It will often drag out another token with it if you’re not careful, which again, can be pretty bad if it’s the wrong thing or catastrophic if you start losing bells as a result. Watch out for the ring! It can get messy.
- Sometimes it’s better to not bother with the round lest you lose your bells. I can sometimes just feel the orientation of the pieces in my hand and think oh, I’m not even going to bother with this one, and that’s sometimes fine. It’s less fine if doing that will lose you the game, but in the moment it’s not terrible to throw a round or two so that you don’t lose any bells.
- Getting used to how the various pieces feel will help you identify them faster. They have fairly distinct sizes and textures, so that will be a good way to get quicker at knowing what is where and how quickly you can eject it from your hand.
- Similarly, you can do a lot by recognizing the link between card color and item count. The cards have different colors for 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 items, so if you recognize that quickly, you can usually get yourself decently set up.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- What an incredibly silly theme. You have to scare off ghosts by dropping your lucky charm collection under your bed, but you can’t dare risk looking under your bed to see the ghosts themselves. I love it.
- Super easy to teach, super easy to play. As you can tell from the rules explanation, the game is a pretty quick setup and pretty quick teach. I love that kind of thing.
- I love the various textures of the components. Everything is fun to touch and different thicknesses and material types. You can use that to pretty easily
- I think that forcing players to keep the bells in their hand is genius, and making them return them to the supply if they’re dropped is diabolical. The game takes significantly longer as you acquire more bells since you’re liable to drop them, and watching a player go net negative on a round because they dropped two bells and still won the round is amazing. It’s a very good type of player frustration, and it’s incredibly difficult to thread that needle.
- The art style is very cute. I really like how cute the ghosts are even though they’re ostensibly there to haunt you.
- This is a very Oink game. There’s something incredibly lovingly crafted about this silly and quick dexterity game, and the care that’s put into the experience is so consistent with every Oink game I’ve played. Also the silly name and the fun theme are very on-brand, too. It’s just a solid entry for their brand.
Mehs
- This is another game that really stretches the limits of how much can fit in an Oink Games standard box. It all works, but just barely! I’m consistently a bit annoyed and a bit impressed.
Cons
- There’s no pleasant way to say this, but you may want to sanitize the pieces every now and then; they get really sweaty lol. No gender, no judgment, just an observation from everyone I’ve played this with; they all mention that the pieces get kind of gross after a while. It’s not the biggest deal, but it can be a bit gross if you’re a purist about this kind of thing. Holding the pieces tight in your hand and nervous high-dexterity stress leads to a bit of stress, so just … get a light mist and spray them down every five or ten games or something.
Overall: 9 / 10
See, DroPolter is exactly the kind of game that is going to end up getting close to the top of my favorites lists. I love the simplicity of it, I love the theme, I love the art, and I love how just fundamentally silly it is. I’m a sucker, as many of you know, for a quick and light dexterity game, and Oink generally knows how to hit that target pretty solidly. DroPolter is another win for Oink, there, asking players to ward off ghosts by dropping lucky charms from their hands. If that were it, that would still be pretty good, granted, but I think what elevates this game from a fun game to a fantastic game is that scoring points adds a bell to your hand that, when it’s dropped accidentally, goes back to the supply. It’s a truly cruel move by the game that keeps the game running, can lead to big upsets, and serves as a valuable catch-up mechanic. The more you have, the harder it is to not drop any; very self-balancing. I love that. It’s extremely clever and doesn’t add any particularly aggressive rules overhead. Beyond that, though, the core game is fun and sharp; I’ve played it a bunch of times and never gotten bored. You just have to drop a few specific things out of your hand without trying too hard to drop the wrong stuff. It’s very cute. If you’re a fan of clever dexterity games, you are a fellow Oink fan, or you just want to try and scare off ghosts just in time for Christmas (unless they’re trying to convince you to stop being a jerk about your money), this game will likely be right up your alley! I’ve had a blast with it.
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