Apparently I have a love hate relationship with dexterity games. It’s a love, because I adore games like Crokinole and Tokyo Highway. Flicking and building rickety structures makes me giddy and excited. But then I also harbour this utter hatred for Jenga. You’d think I’d enjoy that one too, as it’s kind of the quintessential stacking game. I don’t really know what it is, but I don’t like playing Jenga.

Tinderblox, by Rob Sparks is a dexterity game in a small package. Literally, a mint tin holds the entire contents of this game, Which is just some red and yellow cubes, brown sticks, a small deck of cards, and a pair of painfully ineffectual tweezers.

A game of Tinderblox begins with a single campfire card, and 3 brown sticks. Then, on your turn, you draw a card that tells you what you need to add to the fire. You take the tweezers, pluck the pieces out of the tin, arrange them, then place them onto the campfire. If you knock things down, you lose! Sometimes the cards will tell you to use your non-dominant hand, but that’s the extent of the craziness.

Tinderblox is kind of refreshing as a dexterity game. Its miniscule size means you won’t have a deafening crash when something goes wrong, unlike Jenga. It’s easy to transport and play anywhere, unlike Tokyo Highway or Crokinole. In fact, it’s so easy to play anywhere, that I plopped it on the counter while making Christmas dinner at my in-law’s place, and my sister-in-law and I just took our turns in between our chopping and cooking.

The variety in Tinderblox doesn’t come from the game necessarily, but from your fellow players. If you happen to play with someone who takes risks and places their pieces in precarious locations, that game will feel a lot more tense than if your opponent is super conservative and always takes the safe pick.

The tweezers that come in the game are awful, but I postulate that their ineffectuall-ness is really part of the game. Also, the cubes are wider than the logs, which means you can’t just pinch a stack from above. A fair amount of the challenge in Tinderblox is struggling against the physical limitations of those damn tweezers. I know some people have house-ruled that tweezers are optional, or have replaced them with a more functional set, but I’m of the mind that they’re supposed to be bad. Tinderblox is pushing you to fail. That said, you can become skilled at Tinderblox, as my wife has. She and my sister-in-law managed to run the deck out between the two of them, resulting in a grotesque spire of logs and cubes that was an awe to behold.

Tinderblox doesn’t push the envelope on what a dexterity game can do. It’s not a huge physical gimmick that you need to ensure your table is level for. It’s a fun little game to plop on the table during any social event. I recently brought it on vacation with me, and it’s been a hit everywhere I pulled it out. On a friends’ coffee table after dinner, on the pub table, surrounded by drinks, and even as the cap of a longer game night.