RPGnet.com
Shannon Appelcline
February 2006
USA

Wallamoppi comes with a set of high-quality wooden components:

Wooden Box: Wallomoppi comes in a medium-sized wooden box, with the name attractively burned into the sides. The box has a sliding lid, and is just big enough to contain all of the game elements.

The box also doubles as a timer. There are a set of marble ramps along the back, with a chute that you attach to the front. During gameplay you drop a marble into the top of the box, and then have to complete your turn before it reaches the bottom a few seconds later.

Wooden Disks: 36 wooden disks, half of them dark brown, and half of them light brown. Each also has a kiwi burned into it. The disks are slightly rounded, and have a very nice weight to them.

Bag: A pseudo-leather bag, attractive and more than large enough to hold all the pieces.

Marbles: Two small black marbles, used as timers. (You only need one.)

Rulesheet: A short, 4-page rulesheet, printed on glossy cardstock, with illustrations and examples.

Overall the components for Wallamoppi are entirely beautiful and of high quality. Everything has a great feel to it and a great weight to it, and I'm amazed that Out of the Box is retailing this for just $20. I give it a full "5" out of "5" for Style.

The object of Wallamoppi is to successfully pull disks from a wall and form them into a tower.

Building the Wall: Each player chooses a color, dark or light, and then they take turns picking disks from a bag and forming them into a "wall", starting with the dark player.

This wall is actually a pyramid, with 8 disks on the bottom level, 7 on the next, then 6, etc., for a total of 36 disks. When a player draws a disk from the bag, it could be either color--his own or his opponent's. The player then needs to place it strategically, so that if it's one of his own disks it's easy to later retrieve, and if it's one of his opponent's, it's less so.

As players place their disks, they can do so ina fairly freeform way, either building adjacent to already placed disks, at the same level, or else on top of two adjacent disks. The only restrictions are that the shape and size of the final 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 pyramid be respected.

At the end of the wall building, after 34 random disks have been pulled from the bag, the dark player puts a brown disk in the penultimate spot, then the light player puts a white disk at the top of the pyramid.

Building the Tower: Now the players take turns pulling one of their own disks out of the wall, then placing it atop the "tower". The dark player starts once again, and he'll put his disk atop the white disk at the top of the tower. The light player then puts his disk atop that, and play continues in this manner.

To complicate things, there's the marble chute, acting as a timer. A player drops a marble in at the start of his opponent's turn, and his opponent must place his piece atop the tower, then grab the marble before it rolls to the end of the chute.

A player loses if he misses the marble or causes the tower to collapse.

(Causing bits of the wall to collapse is fine, though it might make life easier for one or both of the players, since there are now free disks to use.)

Wallamoppi is a stacking game, like Jenga (1986) and the SdJ-winning Villa Paletti (2001). The main difference between this and other games is its speed element; the actual stacking is generally simpler.

Overall, Wallamoppi is a pretty simple game. It's divided into two stages and there's some strategy in each. In the first stage you can try and make you disks accessible and your opponent's inaccessible. In the second stage you can try and remove disks that are more likely to free up your own disks, and not your opponent's. These strategic elements are relatively minimal, but extant.

As a stacking game, Wallamoppi is also pretty simple. You have multiple places that you can remove a disk from, but only one place you can put it in the tower. What makes the game interesting, however, is the timer element. There's already some tension in the game, because you're worrying about collapsing the tower when you either remove or place your piece, but having to do it all against a timer, and having to snatch a marble up before it reaches the end of the chute, can be nerve-wracking. It definitely gets the heart pumping!

Overall, Wallamoppi is a fun, light design and earns an average "3" out of "5" for Substance.

Wallamoppi is a beautifully produced wooden game that involves dexterity and building a tower of disks. The main attraction of the game is that it requires "fast stacking" because a marble is falling through a timer, marking off the few seconds that you have to accomplish the task. There's some dexterity and a lot of tension. Overall Wallamoppi is a fun, light dexterity game with a twist.

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