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Players: 2-4 (ages 8+)
Playing Time: 15 minutes
If your kids are into destroying each other’s pillow forts—or you’re just tired of hearing, “He knocked my stuff over!” then Knock Your Blocks Off may just be the game to give their destructive tendencies some focus.
The basic premise of the game is to build a simple structure from blocks, attack other structures, and defend your own. Each player attempts to protect a certain block with a crown pictured on it—and to knock over the crown blocks that other players have on their structures.
During each turn, players first build their structures from a selection of preapproved configurations (there are five). Next, players each attempt an attack on another person’s structure by rolling the demolition die. This special die allows you to attack another structure in a particular way (flick the die, toss it, or drop it) in an attempt to knock the crown block off the structure.
Any successful attack or defense of the crown block will award you with victory tokens, and the first player to accumulate eight tokens is the winner of the game.
While kids may delight in the simple physicality of the game, older players may need more of a challenge. For example, each block has one of several two-color patterns on it, and there are rules that determine which edges can touch one another when you build your structure. While younger players may be particularly challenged by this pattern-matching element, the pattern aspect itself doesn’t affect the tactics of play.
Additionally, the types of structures you can build are pretty basic, so your strategy and imagination are limited. It would have been more beneficial to have rules that affect the strategy and methods of play—which would in turn add another level of difficulty to the process while engaging players of various skill levels. For example, it would have been more challenging to let the players determine whatever kind of structure to build and have the pattern rules be the only limit to building.
All in all, Knock Your Blocks Off is a good way to introduce younger children to basic strategy concepts, pattern matching, and spatial recognition, but older children and adults may need more of a challenge.
