Matthew BaileyAfter spending a lot of time with some more complex games over the last week or so, today I thought we would look at something much shorter, and that is “Fuggler: The Dice Game.”
Now, if you don’t know what Fugglers are, they are a very popular cuddly toy range at the moment. Henry absolutely loves them, and they are generally cutely ugly monsters. You can collect them, and there are also ones based on other properties such as “Care Bears,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Gremlins,” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” I’d definitely like to admit that I bought a “Jaws” 50th anniversary Fuggler the other day.
The game itself is really simple. Inside the box you find Squash, a Sasquatch Fuggler, and he sits proudly in the middle of the table with all of the buttonholes. Yes, that’s meant to be a cheeky pun.
Based on the dice you roll, you either get to take a button from the central pile, steal a button from someone else, or if you roll Sasquatch, you get to reverse the order of play. If you roll all three of the same symbol, you can gain extra effects such as losing all your buttons, or if you roll all Fugglers, the first person to steal Sasquatch from the middle of the table gets the golden buttonhole. I mean, it’s yellow, but whatever.
When the central store of buttons runs out, you add them up and the player with the most buttons wins.
It’s a bit of dice rolling, it’s a bit of reaction time, and it’s really simple. It’s not normally the sort of thing we would go for, but we actually quite enjoyed it, especially with Henry, who loves these kinds of simple dice games.
It’s £9.99, doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the Fuggler you get with it is actually quite a nice little Fuggler of a good size. He’s been enjoying having that just to play with.
For a quick dice game to play with very young kids, or kids that aren’t really into board games, it definitely scratches that itch.
Is it amazing? No.
Is it going to win any board game awards? No.
Is it a fun little dice game, especially something that could definitely be given as a present? 100%.
The box says 8+, but you could happily play this with a three or four-year-old if they were interested.
