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.
XOK, pronounced “shock,” is a two-player abstract game from recently acquired Helvetiq imprint Steffen Spiele. The Steffen Spiele logo is a thing of joy. There is no surer indicator of a game’s qualities than that little three-by-three grid. Whatever the particulars of the game, it’s going to be made of wood, it’s going to be abstract, it’s going to be for two players, and it’s going to have straightforward rules.
That is all certainly true of XOK, in which you and your opponent attempt to build an uninterrupted school of ten fish on a surprisingly tiny board. Seriously, every time I set XOK up, I am struck anew by the petite play space. It must have something to do with how substantial the box feels. Thanks to its black coloring, this travel-friendly box seems larger than it actually is, so that little blue cloth mat, covered in hexagons, isn’t what I expect. Neither, to be fair, are the adorable fish. The sharks, beefy hexagons with slots cut out to represent their mouths, are a bit hexagonal to be evocative to many, but they’re a dead ringer for Whale Sharks if you ask me.
On your turn, you can either place two Fish or one Shark. Fish have to be placed on two adjacent empty spaces, which is simple enough. Sharks, on the other hand, have to be fed. When you place a Shark on the board, it has to either go on top of or adjacent to one of your opponent’s Fish. Half your Sharks are small, and have only one mouth. The other Sharks are large, and have two. Don’t think about it too much. The smalls can remove up to two pieces from the board and the larges can remove up to three.
The problem with abstract games, when considering a new one, is that there are so many of them. They’ve been around a long time, and we’ve more or less perfected the formula. It isn’t likely that a seasoned abstract player is going to encounter a design that blows their mind. XOK is full of positional tradeoffs and tense exchanges, but you expect that. It would be a failure if it weren’t. At this point, abstracts are about the quiet pleasures, the subtle gradations of texture and tempo that separate one abstract game from another. XOK certainly doesn’t do anything mechanically that hasn’t been seen before, but there’s a certain joy to it.
While this is not a genre known for its thematic evocation, the more I play XOK, the more narrative it becomes. In the tradeoffs between players, the ways clusters of pieces shift about the board, I see schools of fish swarming, first to one section then to another, the sharks behind them all the while. I really enjoy it.
XOK is clean, effective, and charming. Adults will find plenty to enjoy, but it is an ideal abstract game for kids, who would take a long time to figure out the two or three tricks that are baked in. It is an absolute gem of a design, with an impressively clear arc over its brisk 10-15 minutes. Is this a game you’re going to play for the rest of your life? Probably not. But that’s not a realistic standard to hold any game to. There are joys to discover in XOK, plenty of fish swimming down in those depths.
XOK details
- Designer: Joel Escalante, Rafael Escalante
- Artists: Ewelina Proczko
- Publishers: Steffen Spiele
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 15 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Area Movement, Connections
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.24839 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about XOK.
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