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.
I never had the chance to play the game My Shelfie (2022, Cranio Creations), but I wanted to try it.
I am always trying to track down the games designed by Phil Walker-Harding, the gifted artist who has given us games such as Sushi Go Party, Super Mega Lucky Box, and Cities. Knowing that Walker-Harding was a co-designer on My Shelfie made it appealing, and that appeal only grew when I learned that Matthew Dunstan (Next Station: London, The Guild of Merchant Explorers) was also involved.
But My Shelfie fell flat for at least one of the folks in my game group, and I never pursued it afterwards. In early 2024, I had a meeting with the team at Cranio Creations to talk about My Shelfie: The Dice Game, loosely based on the original game with a Yahtzee-style approach to gameplay. And there’s a really cute cat on the cover.
Unfortunately, the gameplay in this new iteration of the My Shelfie brand didn’t land with the gamers who sat with me for each play. In fact, my family said it best: they would rather play the “OG”, Yahtzee, over this newer iteration.
You Get Three Rolls
My Shelfie: The Dice Game asks players to use a dry-erase tile to track scores as they attempt to roll six dice, three times, in order to collect matching symbols and score points. Much like Yahtzee, players can keep or discard previously-rolled results. Unlike Yahtzee, players can mark up to three different spots on the dry-erase board aligned with any rolled results on each turn.
What makes My Shelfie: The Dice Game interesting is the moment when a player completes a row or column on their personal 5×5 bingo card. When that happens, all other players must cross out the spaces they haven’t previously filled in that same row or column, making those spaces inactive for the rest of the game for opponents.
That makes everything a race, and it makes My Shelfie: The Dice Game a shorter experience than a similar player count game of Yahtzee. When the final scores are tallied, players can only score rows or columns where they have successfully marked at least three spaces.
Giving players six dice also increases the odds that they can get a five-of-a-kind, generating the largest score (eight points) for a space on the tracking sheet. The six-sided dice each feature five different symbols aligned to the rows of the dry-erase tile, plus a sixth wild face that can be used to boost the total pip count of any rolled die face. (Wilds cannot be used to score a space on their own.) So, over the course of the game, chances are good that a player will have a couple big turns and a number of airballs, particularly late in the game.
Lack of Wow
My Shelfie: The Dice Game was OK. Turns are quick, and it is very easy to teach the game (my review plays were joined by adult players as well as my kids, ages 10 and 8). It’s impossible for My Shelfie: The Dice Game to overstay its welcome, because the condition regarding the removal of scoring spaces means that everyone is going to have a few Xs on their mat along with a bunch of marked circles. End-game scoring is similarly quick.
Sadly, at no point, did any player say something that indicated we were in “wow territory.” There is no other interaction in the game, save for the removal of some spaces. Usually, all a player can do between turns is watch their opponent roll the dice three times. (Yahtzee and My Shelfie: The Dice Game share this problem.) That means a four-player game of My Shelfie: The Dice Game is a miss, so stick with a lower player count.
Save for being a more economically-friendly version of Yahtzee (a game that still uses paper scoring sheets, for crying out loud!), I would be surprised if players felt that My Shelfie: The Dice Game “feels” like the base game. I’m not sure that the dice game is a must-own for someone who has My Shelfie.
The biggest surprise of this entire review? My Shelfie: The Dice Game is designed by Simone Luciani, the man that is either my second or third favorite designer of all time. Luciani’s presence here should have elevated the design, but that’s not how it turned out. BGG indicates that My Shelfie: The Dice Game is based on Luciani’s earlier design Penk!, not the My Shelfie base game, so it’s possible that Cranio looked at this new dice game as a way to align a stronger brand to an older game.
That’s all well and good, but I wish My Shelfie: The Dice Game aimed higher. As it is, even this year’s Sausage Sizzle—itself a remake of an earlier design-or classics like the That’s So Clever! games demand more attention in the “roll and lock” space than this new work.
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