Base price: $26.
3 – 6 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 4
Full disclosure: A review copy of Hand-to-Hand Wombat was provided by Exploding Kittens.
I’m still really enjoying this whole “micro review” thing that I’ve been doing. I get to dig in a bit more on the opinion side and you all still get to read too many words about board games. It’s really an ideal synergy. I’m sure I’ll come up with a few new concepts eventually, but let’s enjoy the now while we have it before I finish this review, edit some photos, and immediately take an hour or two nap. It’s Saturday; I deserve this.
In Hand-to-Hand Wombat, you’re wombats. Good starting point. You’re also building towers. Why? Don’t worry about it. Unfortunately, one of you is actually a very nasty wombat. Holds grudges. Real piece of work. They also hate towers. It’s got a lot to do with their relationship with their father. I wouldn’t read too much into it personally. But they’ve hidden among you as you’re planning on building towers to try and sabotage. Would be easy to find them, but you’ve got to play with your eyes closed and on a timer! Adds a bit of complication. So get in there, build some towers, and defeat your hated rivals. Will you be able to build (or destroy) enough to get the job done?
Overall: 6 / 10
Overall, I enjoyed some aspects of Hand-to-Hand Wombat, and others fell a bit flat for me. As a noted non-fan of social deduction, you should take some of this with that context, though, to be fair. I do love dexterity games, though, so maybe it all cancels out? Who knows. But, to start with the high points, I do think that the theme of the game is wonderful. It’s goofy, it’s silly, and it makes for a great party game to get players excited about the hobby by trying something they certainly have not tried before in any way, shape, or form. It’s fairly novel, in that sense. Also, the component quality and insert / storage are excellent. Everything looks and feels really nice (which is critical, since you need to be able to feel the differences between the components since you’re playing with your eyes closed). And, most importantly, the theoretical play loop of the game makes a lot of sense. One player (usually) is here to sabotage, so everyone plays while one person messes around, and at the end if they did too well, you can usually suss them out and ban them. Normally not a huge fan of player “elimination”, but with such a short game, it hardly matters.
Where I get a bit more frustrated with the game is around the practicals of how it plays. With relatively new players, you won’t notice a ton of issues, but like many social deduction games, as players get increasingly familiar with it, the game starts to tilt somewhat. For instance, it’s a perfectly valid strategy for the Wicked Wombat (bad team; doesn’t want towers completed) to grab all of the size-1 blocks and hold them so that no tower can be completed. A little annoying. Similarly, the good team can just place their hand on top of their tower to keep it from being built on or deconstructed. Also maybe a bit less fun than you’d hope. Granted, you can try and rule those things out or have players gradually come up with counters to that (for instance, forcing every player to touch every other player’s hand to make sure they’re not holding anything), but then the game becomes as much process as play (which is challenging, for such a short game). It might just be a consequence of social deduction as a genre.
That all said, Hand-to-Hand Wombat is still a game that I bring to a lot of game nights with new players. They’re delighted. It’s easy to learn, the accusations fly wildly, and even watching them come up with things that are “strategically annoying” is fun, because they come up with it on their own. There’s a sense of discovery there that, for players, can be very affirming and get them excited about discovering more things in more games. There’s balance amid that frustration, though, I suppose; I just end up getting tired of social deduction games faster than I used to. If you’re not having that issue, you enjoy some speed-building, or you just like sabotaging your friends, you’ll probably get a kick out of Hand-to-Hand Wombat! I found it amusing.
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