Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
High Rise Penguins, from publisher Alley Cat Games, is the new English edition of Yura Yura Penguin, a nichely-beloved dexterity game from designer Yabuchi Ryoko. The idea is simple: Players take turns playing cards Uno-style onto an ever-growing iceberg condo. If you empty your hand, you win. If the condo falls on your turn, you lose. If the condo ever reaches the point of being completed—good luck with that—then everyone wins.
Each card forces the following player to do something. Maybe you have to add the next level to the apartment block, or draw cards, or place some ice crystals into the apartments. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get to help move one of the adorable little wooden penguin meeples into their new apartment. Those are the moments when the structure is most vulnerable, but the sense of peril is balanced out by the rush of endorphins that comes with touching one of the penguins. They are very cute.
Maybe a little too cute. While High Rise Penguins comes in a petite little box, making it extremely portable and an ideal bar game, the size can prove challenging for the adults among us. Meeple Mountain’s founder, Andy Matthews, is a tall and broad man, with hands ideal for metal smithing or stonemasonry, and he had a good deal of difficulty with manipulating the pieces. When one of your fingers is as wide as the entire opening for the penguins, you’re in for a rough time. He took to tossing them in and hoping the structure would hold.
My partner loves quick, silly dexterity games, so I’ve been playing quite a few of them of late. The form factor of High Rise Penguins is exceptional. The art from both Yabuchi Ryoko and HAMI is fabulous, and the tower pops on a table. That said, the game play never quite sings. Not with a table full of adults, anyway. I’d rather pull out Tinderblox, Dro Polter, or, space providing, Rhino Hero Super Battle. High Rise Penguins is beautiful and briefly charming, but the charm melts away a bit more quickly than one might hope.
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