Base price: $15.
2+ players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Ok, this one was motivated by two factors: first, it was 72 outside (about, 22ish for y’all outside the US) and I played a bunch of dexterity games this weekend. Both are great reasons to talk about dexterity games, even though it was frankly warmer than I would like. I am a blessed indoor cat and when it gets above like, 60, I get too warm. People love grilling when it gets warm, though, so this is a tribute to y’all. Standing out side in the heat. Using fire to make meat hot. This review’s for you.
In Barbecubes, you’re trying to host the ultimate grilling party. Unfortunately, your friends (?) are convinced that they’re better at grilling than you and they keep trying to put things on your grill. This absolute indignity will not stand, so you’re going to just absolutely shred them by placing things on your grill far better than they could ever dream of doing. You will ascend beyond their grilling dreams. You will become whatever the grill equivalent of Ozymandias, king of kings, is. And that’s critical. So grab your grillin’ tongs and slap some meat on the barbeque and I swear I’ve actually grilled before. Do you have what it takes to thrill the grill?
Contents
Setup
Just, you know, set up the grill. You’re going to place the two grill pieces onto the tin:
Set aside the various food tokens:
Shuffle the cards:
And give the starting player a set of tongs:
You’re good to start!
Gameplay
Your goal here is to grill, but not chill, because we have to make ourselves legally distinct from Dairy Queen. I can’t afford to go to court with them again. Dexterity is critical because, I mean, nobody wants to eat dropped meat. That sucks.
To start a turn, flip a card, and place the pictured item onto the specified part of the grill using the tongs. You either have to place it touching exactly one bar of the grill or exactly two bars of the grill. If it shows a hand on the card, you have to use your non-dominant hand with the tongs! Just for extra challenge. If you drop the meat, that’s actually sometimes ok! If it falls off the grill, pick it back up and try again. If it falls into the tin (or knocks anything else in), you’re done and you take the revealed card as a penalty (no matter how many meats dropped).
If you take two cards, you’re eliminated! The game continues until there’s only one player left, and they become the grill’s God-Emperor and rule the grill for two hundred thousand lifetimes. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the price of success.
Player Count Differences
The one major issue with this is player elimination. I’m not too concerned about the player count differences, otherwise, as even as more things get added to the grill, there’s equal odds that players are going to knock stuff off the grill, so it mostly evens out. As player count increases, though, there’s usually going to be a few people who get knocked out and just have to watch everyone else play. Don’t love that. Play quickly, for their sake, I suppose? There isn’t much else, honestly; everyone is expected to pass the tongs to the next player, so having more people isn’t necessarily going to make anything out of that. The extra tong is just there in case you lose one. I’ve found this is very heated at two players, which is a lot of fun for me personally and my love of weird dexterity games with tongs, but your mileage may vary as your player count increases.
Strategy
I mean, you’re putting barbecue foods onto the grill; maybe don’t take this too seriously.
- Find a stable grab point. One of the clumsiest things you can do is grab the meat in such a way that it slides out of your tongs. Try to find a point where it’s a stable grab; for a few pieces it’s usually at the narrowest point of the meat. Or just make sure it’s secure before you try to bring it over the grill itself; if it falls outside, it’s fine; if it falls in, it’s burnt.
- Avoid the points between the two grill pieces, if you can. They’re not attached to each other in the same way that the pieces of wood within a grill piece are, so they’re liable to shake and rattle and not necessarily be as secure as other spots. Naturally, this means that players prioritizing their safety are going to take those spots up first, so do what you can.
- You can try to set your opponents up, at your own risk. You’re totally allowed to place food in completely illogical spots that aren’t particularly safe, as long as you’re following the instructions on your card. If a player bumps the tin or the grill in the wrong way, it can all come crashing down. Setting that up is rude, but functionally practical.
- Center of gravity matters a lot. If you’re placing on one bar, you want the piece’s center of gravity to be along that bar. Don’t have one half of the piece hanging over the edge in either direction if you can avoid it, otherwise it’s liable to tip and fall in.
- The pieces are not symmetrical, generally speaking. You could have a piece hanging over the edge if the meat were perfectly symmetrical, but most of them aren’t and I don’t feel like you have the time or resources to weigh them appropriately. If you are trying to suss out the weight during the game, the other players might get upset. Always observe decent table etiquette!
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I do think it’s charming that they made a vegetarian-friendly version. There’s a veggies-only version. That’s extremely silly, a bit impractical from a product standpoint, and delightful. Now your vegetarian friends can have a game that’s all for them, and they still shouldn’t eat any of the pieces.
- Very portable! The tin games are great for that; I think some of the other Alley Cat Games ones I’ve played are Tinderblox and Kittin. I think they’ve moved away from the tin-centric naming of the games as they’ve released more tins, which is sad but understandable.
- Look, any games with tongs are going to be right up my alley. Tokyo Highway is still one of the all-time greats, for me, so any game with tongs or tweezers or that one chopsticks block game are going to be something I’m all about. It’s fun, whimsical, and deeply silly, and also it’s not really an interaction mechanism that players are particularly good at, which is all the more reason to make it the primary interaction mechanism for your game.
- The pixel vibes of the food are very delightful as well. I think it makes me a bit nostalgic for Minecraft, but it also makes the pieces significantly easier to grab.
- Easy to explain and plays quickly. You’re just throwing things on the grill without letting them fall into the grill. Everyone who’s ever grilled anything intuitively understands how to play.
- The conceptual silliness of this is very fun and pleasant. People love tiny foods, and I’m people. You can have a mini barbeque game while you’re at a real barbeque. That’s goofy; I love it.
Mehs
- I think I wish the grill pieces were more stable relative to each other; they don’t fit perfectly into the tin so there’s a little gap between them, at times. Feels like a little bit of a gap in the design, but what can you do? It adds some drama to the game.
Cons
- The pieces are a bit more slippery than I imagined? Or maybe it’s the tongs. Hard to say, but it can sometimes be tough to maintain a grip even when you’re in a good spot on the food. I’m loathe to gripe about this too much because something something only a shoddy craftsman blames his tools something something.
- Still don’t love player elimination. I’d honestly even consider tweaking the rules to be players continue to play but once every player but one has at least two cards, that player wins. I don’t normally like suggesting house rules during the review process, but I really don’t like player elimination in most games. The whole point of playing a game is having fun with your friends, not watching someone else play. That said, the game is very short, so if you’re not seeing much of an issue with player elimination, I’d just as soon say let it lie.
Overall: 8.25 / 10
Overall, I like Barbecubes a lot! It’s the exact blend of things that I’m looking for in a dexterity game: it’s quick, whimsical, and looks good enough that I’ll get it to the table easily. Adding in that high portability that comes with the tin option is fantastic, because then I can slide it in with my other small-box faves and take it with me on the go! I really need to start tagging more games with “small-box games” so that I can keep track of all these for that explicit reason; something to do next time around. In the meantime, I’ll continue explaining what makes this game so fun. I think a good dexterity game should have crowd appeal along some axis, either visually or mechanically or socially. Here, there’s not much silliness to be found beyond the whimsy of using tongs, but that whimsy is strong, so it gets solid marks mechanically. Everything is tiny, and people love tiny food. There are entire social media channels about people making food in dollhouses. So it succeeds quite well visually and mechanically. The player elimination element actively impedes Barbecubes on the social front somewhat, but if you’re playing a quick game or a low player count game I figure you’ll hardly notice. Plus, it fits into its thematic niche quite well; this is a fantastic game to play outside while waiting for someone to grill. The game fits into the tin and generally tries to contain itself to the tin, so you’re not necessarily going to be losing a ton of pieces by throwing them or slapping them or launching them in some way. That’s just … a relief, after playing so many dexterity games and finding pieces everywhere (even irrelevant-to-the-dexterity pieces, like in CATAN: Soccer Fever). I’m genuinely unsure what people are doing. But if you feel the call in your soul to dexterity games, you enjoy grilling, or the idea of tiny meats compels you, Barbecubes is sure to get (and keep!) your attention. I’ve had a lot of fun with it.
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!
Interested in reading more? Check out a random review!
