Matthew Bailey“Monster Splat” is a fairly unusual dexterity game where you are trying to collect monsters to move your player around the board.
Essentially, each player gets a sticky monster hand made of a sticky polymer that can be flicked to try and catch monster tiles that are on the table. You spin the spinner, and whichever monster it lands on, all players have to be the first to grab the correct monster.
First and foremost, using the flickers is quite good fun, and the boys had a laugh doing this, but the novelty wears out super quickly. The sticky hands get dirty very quickly and need to be cleaned. And as you know, with all things like this, with the best will in the world, after you have cleaned them, they’re never quite as good as they are brand new.
This is actually the second copy of “Monster Splat” that we own because the first one had the sticky hands break, and for some reason that I’m not quite sure why, we decided to replace it with a second copy.
One of the key issues is that the action needed to accurately splat with the hand is surprisingly difficult, and once someone gets the hang of it, they can easily beat other players.
Part of the reason why I did not play here is because I am pretty good at it, and there is very little chance that I would lose. In the rules, the first person to pick up the monster is supposed to win, but it all gets a bit hectic and foul play accusatory when you half pick up a monster and flick it almost towards you, or two hands collide exactly at the same time with a relevant monster.
Ravensburger is one of those odd companies that straddles the line between hobbyist and mainstream but the build quality here sits firmly in the mainstream camp. The hands are fine but can break easily, The insert is good but considering you use the box as your score counter it could be better than just bare recycled cardboard and everything is just very plasticky.
While filling out the prices section below I realised that this seems to now be discontinued so is fairly difficult to get ahold of.. I bought this copy a few years ago for around £10 but the best I could find is old stock going for around £24!
I would probably say give it a bash if you find it at a board game cafe and somehow they had managed to keep the sticky hands clean. But realistically, this is not worth spending the money on, there isn’t really a game here and the novelty of the splatting wears off fast…
…and definitely not worth spending the money on twice.
