I missed out on Tetris. Of course, I have played it occasionally over the years, but it came out in a window of time that I missed. The other night when I was chatting about it on Gumbo Live on Twitch with Mitchell and Jay, I did not even remember the theme song. Don’t judge, please! In fact, I had to look up the game on Wiki to find out more information, as I just remember it being ubiquitous around 1990.
Tetris actually came out in 1985, and by 2011 has sold hundreds of millions of copies. When it would have been the big fad, I was probably primarily gaming on my Apple IIe — focused on games like Zork and Planetfall and Microleague Baseball instead. I see now that Spectrum Holybyte did publish a version of Tetris back around 1990, and you can buy a copy if you want for the low, low price of $295.
So all of that is to say that I know Tetris, I’ve played Tetris, but I never loved Tetris. I distinctly remember liking the puzzle aspect — in other words, fitting the polynomial shapes into the right slots — but not the real time part. I think playing hours and hours of Kaboom! on the Atari 2600 in the 1980s cured me of any love for that genre.
So, I was more than a little trepidatious when Number Drop showed up in the Gumbo Pot. I shouldn’t have. Number Drop gives the feels without the fear.
Number Drop is a new game released by AEG here in the United States at GEN CON 2023. (It was previously released in France in 2021 by Débâcle Jeux but unavailable in the States until this year.) It is designed by Florian Sirieix and Benoit Turpin. Sirieix designed the wonderfully quirky Nicodemus with Bruno Cathala, a snappy little engine building game with wild steampunk-meets-the-zoo that everyone should play, if not own. Turpin has a ton of design credits, probably being best known for Welcome To… but he also lives in Toulouse so he lives a charmed life, in my opinion.
I like the tagline the designers gave Number Drop: “retro roll & write”. We’ve got so many good terms for this genre, and always room for more, so I appreciate the effort. Jake & Danielle of the never forgotten Draft Mechanic Podcast called them “randowriters” and I loved that term. Motorcity Gameworks calls their versions “Loaded Roll & Writes”, which always sounds like a stuffed baked potato with cheddar and bacon, but their crunchy randowriters like Three Sisters and French Quarter certainly fit the moniker.
Here are the basics. Number Drop is for up to six players, and is easily finished in under a half an hour. In fact, it’s the kind of game where you will probably play it back-to-back, because it’s easy for someone to say at the end, “rack that up again”. The production is pitch perfect. It’s got a retro vibe that screams the 1980s look of Agent Provocateur but in neon colors instead of bright primaries.
Set up is a breeze. Each player gets a sheet from a pad — I mean, it is a randowriter after all — and the active player gets five dice. Ten block tiles, showing the different shapes to be used in the game, are shuffled and five of them are randomly placed into the appropriately named Block Board. A space on the sheet is filled in and the dice are rolled to start the game.
The object? Take the shapes that are assigned each round by the dice results, slide them onto the sheet (that looks just like an empty Tetris screen) and all the way down the sheet until they are locked into place, and score points during the game for completing rows and making combos with the numbers in your shapes. That’s essentially the game.
Well, not really. There are a few twists to give it some element of the real time aspect without all of the increased heart rate that goes with the music. When the active player rolls the dice, one of the numbers tells the players which shape of the six familiar Tetris pieces will be used that round. (One of them is wild, so that lets players pick any of the other five shapes). The other four dice have numbers, ranging from wild to seven.
Those four numbers have to be filled in to the boxes created by the shape that round. So, if the players rolled a square, then four numbers in the shape of the square must be placed such that the square appears to have “fallen” to the bottom of the Tetris sheet. Then, once the shape is locked in, the player looks at the sheet to see if there are any combos created by the new shape. The combos range from three numbers to eight, and are in two types: either all the same number, or in ascending / descending order. Plus, the combos score for the size of the combo; in other words, if you string together the numbers 2-3-4-5-6 tracing them orthogonally connected in a row, then you score five points at the end.
The stress of doing this in real time is taken out, of course, but it comes back in the form of the “drop blocks”.
Remember I told you that at the start of the game five shapes would be randomly chosen for the block board? Those are the shapes that players can assign to other players’ boards for “blocking”. This might have been the most confusing part of the game, but it is simpler than it sounds. Anytime a player gets both the same number combo (as in three of a kind) and the ascending / descending combo (as in a run of numbers) in the same size before any other player reaches that level, then the other players will have to play the blocked shape of that level instead of the normal shape. The block shape is made up of “x”s instead of numbers, and breaks up your connections for combo scoring.
It’s frustrating when it happens, but the “real time simulation” comes in the fact that the block is not triggered right away. It is only triggered the next time one of the wild symbols comes up on the dice. That’s ingenious. That simple little twist creates tension, with the players knowing that someone completed a level that will block them, and so they have the choice of playing around that expected shape or racing to complete that level themselves so they can join in the block party. Every player that reaches that level before the next wild symbol comes up will be exempt. (If more than one level is completed, they will trigger in alphabetical order.)
I have played this live and on BGA, and it is so much better than I expected. By now, I have played a ton of roll and writes, from the simplicity of Harvest Dice to the too-complex-for-my-tastes Twilight Inscription. Do I have room for one more? Yes, I have room for this one for sure, because the puzzle of fitting shapes on the board each round appeals to me, and I trade in the real-time stress of Tetris for the made up stress of completing combos before the other players round-by-round. That’s a trade I would make any day.
The first time I tried Number Drop, I couldn’t help comparing my play to Brikks, a Wolfgang Warsch design from 2018 that I played at Dice Tower Con that summer. It’s been a while, but I remember Brikks being a little bit too fiddly for my taste. Number Drop is the opposite of fiddly. Just roll five dice, and draw the shape with numbers from the results, and the round is essentially done.
There is one little bit of lagniappe to the rules that I would not have expected but makes diabolical sense. How do you end the game when you have unlimited dice rolls and no tick-tock-tick-tock clock speeding up the game? The designers cleverly added a top barrier that triggers the end game when broken. Each round, players are trying to fit in the random pieces onto their board, going ever higher with each shape. Eventually, they will run out of room and some one will have part or all of their shape poking above that top line. That not only signals the last round, but every line that is broken above that border costs the player five points! It’s a juicy decision trying to decide whether to go for one more combo that will cost some points or just play it safe for one more round.
Number Drop is certainly not going to appeal to everyone. There is literally zero theme involved, just like the original Russian game. The designers did not even try to shoehorn a theme onto this abstract (I’m looking at you Lost Cities), they were obviously happy just to pay homage to a beloved game with their dreamy version. But if you like puzzles, and you like randowriters, it’s a solid addition for your game nights, and the player counts means this is a perfect game to end the night.
Just make sure you have Mitchell from the Beans & Dice podcast there so he can hum the tune while you play.
Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo
** A complimentary copy of the game was provided by the publisher. **
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