Fayette Daily News
John Stonebraker
January 19, 2007
USA

Did you ever like building things as a kid and then knocking them down or tearing them up? I know I’m guilty of having enjoyed that sort of thing a time or two. Well, Out of The Box has capture all of the excitement of the building and the destruction in the game Wallamoppi. Gameplay is simple – you either have the light or dark game pieces and take turns placing pieces on the table. Did I mention you need a flat, stable surface to play on? This is VERY important. The only rules at this point are that the pieces are played either next to existing pieces (in a straight line) or on top of two touching pieces but half on each supporting piece. You’re allowed eight pieces on the bottom, seven on the second level, etc., until the last piece is played alone on the top level. At the end of the building phase, you have a wall of pieces shaped like a pyramid.

Then the fun starts. The first player starts the timer (more on this later) and must remove a piece of their color from the wall, place it on top of the stack and grab the marble (be patient – I told you I’d have more on that timer later!) before the time expires and without knocking the wall/tower over.

You win by not being the person to mess up – which, again, is accomplished by being too slow or too sloppy. A game is fast and exciting, although frequently noisy at the ending. We scared the cat and just about everyone else at the finale of our first game. (I didn’t win, by the way – more on this later.)

The game is great quality, as I’m coming to expect from Out of the Box. It comes in a wooden box with a slide-out cover. Inside is a nice leatherlike bag containing the playing pieces – large, round wooden disks in two colors.

What about that timer you promised to tell us about, you say? Well, that’s another cool feature – the box is the timer. You stand the box on end and connect a wooden ramp at the bottom. To start the timer, you drop a marble – two are included to keep the game moving faster – in a hole in the top of the box, and it rolls down a zig-zag set of ramps– making a nice “thunk” each time it drops to the next ramp to remind you that time is passing – until it rolls out the ramp at the bottom where you can grab it.

All in all, this is a great game – if you enjoy it. I did okay at it, but this is one of those games where the kids are probably going to dominate in every home, and I got over the thrill of knocking over a block tower a few years back. It is also just a two-player game, but given that you can knock out (...or maybe knock over?) a game in 5 minutes, it would still work well with a group of people. Finally, as I stated earlier, you have to have a flat, sturdy surface to play it on, and given the nature of the game, that also means it’s going to be loud. So, if this game sounds interesting to you, you can’t go wrong with Wallamoppi.

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