The real fun comes when you stop being conservative and start trying to outdo others by placing workers, supports, and beams in the most ridiculous places possible, rather than just trying to complete your turn. Sure, you have to have some skill in placing the construction bits, but you always have some choices in where to put them, and there are usually options that at least might work. This provides a whole load of extra angles for your girders and balancing becomes far more difficult on a sloping surface. At first glance, it looks like the type of family/kid's game you'd find in the toy section of Wal-Mart but I assure you, this game is just as enjoyable for adults as it is children and has a great deal of strategy, requires honed spacial awareness skills and an understanding of physics.

Otherwise, it gives me everything I want while sticking to the familiar formula of building a structure and hoping it doesn’t fall. In the box you’ll find girders in four colours (orange, purple, black and white), big grey support blocks, bricks and beams that the workers sometimes have to carry, a deck of cards, a cardboard hook and crane, and finally the star of the show, the workers themselves. This is where the second consequence of dropping something comes in, and it’s one of the best things about Men at Work.Since it’s more rules-heavy than you might expect for a stacking game, you’ll probably find yourself checking the rulebook quite often for minor clarifications. The hook I mentioned above is for hooking fallen meeples and pieces out from under the construction, which turns into a part of the game itself. Sometimes it’s nice to play something that requires almost no thinking and strategy, and I love how just about anyone, of any age can play this, and do well. Men At Work is a stacking and balancing game from the makers of Junk Art, in which players compete as workers on a building site who are carefully constructing a tower whilst avoiding accidents and, maybe, earning Employee of the Month awards. Pretzel Games has a knack for producing quality dexterity games, I love that Plan B has branched out into this market with their label.

When a player reveals a card, they must look at the top of the deck to see what they are placing and then read the revealed instruction to know how. This is a really lovely dexterity game with beautiful wooden components, a great box with preformed insert, and lots of replayability. No matter what’s happening in Men at Work, regardless of who’s winning or whose turn it is, everyone is always engaged and at least smiling, if not laughing. If you've not played a dexterity game, they are infuriatingly joyous and have you twitching with excitement and trepidation. The traditional way to win is if a player collects the required number of worker of the month awards.If you already have a dexterity game you really like and you don’t play it that often, Men at Work might not have enough there to completely change your stance on the genre. I quite often play with more than two safety certificates per person when playing with my son, or we’ll have a rule that if a brick or beam fall, you can replace them without penalty. Instruction cards are two-sided, with one side showing the piece to be placed and the other showing special rules. Although player elimination can work in games like Sub Terra, Men at Work is proof that sometimes, it’s a bad idea.