Board & Card Game News
Don Leavitt
March 2005
USA

Out of the Box Publishing could not have picked a better place to unveil their latest easy-to-learn game than Las Vegas.  Fast-paced and incredibly intense, Wallamoppi is a stacking and balancing strategy game with a clever twist, and its debut was a huge crowd-pleaser at the 2005 GAMA Trade Show.

Described as “the fast stacking game,” Wallamoppi is a two-player game that combines balancing skills, speed and strategy with a little bit of luck.  The game is played in two phases: first, players take turns stacking wooden disks to build a pyramid wall; they then take turns removing disks from the bottom and replacing them on the top, being careful not to make the wall fall over.

If you're thinking “been there, done that” with other games like Hasbro's Jenga®, think again.  Out of the Box has taken the idea and added one of the most creative time elements ever devised: players stand the wooden game box on one end so that it has a hole in the topmost side; before a player takes his turn, his opponent drops a marble into the hole; the marble drops down a gravity track, giving the player exactly five seconds to take his turn.  The player must remove and restack his disk and catch the marble before it falls or he loses the game.

“People haven't seen a balance game that involved a timing element,” says Matt Mariani, Out of the Box's director of marketing.  “There's speed involved with this game, and so you've got that added tension.”

Mariani describes the winner of the game as the player who doesn't lose, and he says there are two ways of losing: “If the stack falls over on your turn, or if the marble falls before you complete your move, then you lose.”  Unlike traditional stacking games, players have to concentrate on time as well as strategy, and Mariani says this makes the basic balancing idea more interesting.  “We decided it would be fun to set a timing element into the game.”

The name Wallamoppi sounds like it should mean something, but it doesn't.  Mariani says they wanted to create a game that looked like it had been played centuries ago, and they made up the word “wallamoppi” because it felt “aboriginal.”  All of the game's pieces, including the box, are made out of wood, and the gravity timer is built right into the box, becoming part of the game's packaging.  According to Mariani, finding the right kind of timer was a challenge: “We tried different sand timers, but they didn't have the feel of a game played in ancient times.”

Wallamoppi retails for $19.95 and is intended for ages 7 and up.  Players can learn the game in under five minutes, making it a perfect fit for Out of the Box's easy-to-learn, fun-to-play games.

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