Description
2 Players, Age 7 to Adult, Game time 5 minutes. Winner of 7 awards.
Fun is in the balance! Racing against time, players take it in turns attempting to one-up each other by pulling Kiwi Disks from a teetering wall, and daring to stack them ever higher! The last player to successfully stack a disk before the timer marble drops out of sight wins Wallamoppi!
Contains 36 Kiwi Disks, wooden box with marble timer, bag and instructions.
‘Wallamoppi’ Review by Ben Rainbird, The Actor:
After reviewing my way through a string of word and card games, Wallamoppi made for an interesting change. A twist on the traditional tower-building balance game, Wallamoppi is a two-player game that mixes things up a bit by introducing a fairly tight time limit to each move, by virtue of the game box cleverly incorporating a built-in marble clock.
Indeed it’s this box, with a big Kiwi bird carved into it, that attracts the attention. Like most of the other game components, Wallamoppi’s packaging is all wood, which makes for a pleasingly tactile game. Inside are 36 chunky round Kiwi discs (half dark and half light) in a fetching fabric bag, two marbles for the timer, and, helpfully, the rules. These are fairly simple:
To begin with, one player gets a light Kiwi disc, and the other player gets a dark one. Beginning with the dark player, they take turns blindly drawing discs from the bag and start building a triangular wall, beginning with eight discs on the bottom and finishing with one at the top, where the players place the discs they recieved at the beginning of the game. The players must place whichever disc they draw out of the bag, regardless of the colour. Once this is finished, the marble timer comes into play. Now, on each turn, the marble is dropped into the top of the timer and the player must pull out a disc of their own colour from the wall and place them on top to form a tower, then grab the marble before it gets all the way to the bottom of the timer, and disappears down the chute. If either player fails to do their move within the time limit or makes the tower collapse, it’s game over and the other player wins the match.
Wallamoppi does well in distinguishing itself from the competition, with very good visual design (Kiwi birds galore) and extremely well-made components. There’s something pleasing about playing with carved wooden pieces instead of moulded plastic ones, it lends a certain gravity to the proceedings, and makes everything feel a little more traditional.
It’s not really a party game, as only two people can play at once, and although it’s perfectly portable, I see Wallamoppi as more of an indoor game, the sort that a couple might enjoy on a rainy day at home. That being said I’m sure the game will appeal to many people. Besides simply being a lot of fun to play, it’s something different and gets more and more suspenseful as the game progresses and the tower becomes taller and starts to wobble ever more menacingly…
Distributed exclusively in the British Isles by David Westnedge Ltd., London.
