SPIEL '18 Preview: Impact: Battle of Elements, or If You Strike Me Down...

I love introducing games to people, but you need to have the right games on hand for this process to succeed. My favorite game is Carl Chudyk's Innovation, but I'm unlikely to whip out Innovation at a casual gathering and coerce folks into building and splaying because it's a thinky game, a focal point for the evening rather than something to play on the side while waiting for burgers to finish on the grill.

One of my go-to games for several years was Dieter Nüßle's Strike, which debuted from Ravensburger in 2012. It's a great game to play at a restaurant, as long as you can keep the dice on the table, and when I brought it to a picnic for high school exchange students, Strike had a crowd around it for hours, with players tag-teaming in and out of games as they ate, played soccer, and hung out with friends who were all heading home to different countries.

Strike is simple. Each player starts with 6-9 dice, and on a turn you must throw a die into the arena. If any die in the arena now shows an X, remove it from play; if any dice show matching numbers, claim those dice and end your turn; if nothing matches, you can end your turn or throw another die in. If you run out of dice, you're out of the game. If the arena is empty at the start of your turn, throw all of your dice into the arena instead of only one. Whoever stays in the game the longest wins.

The goal of Strike is equally simple: Hang out with people, and enjoy moments created by the gameplay. You're not making plans for anything, and you're not building an engine for the future — you're hoping to make crazy shots while watching others (and yourself) get exasperated or surprised when the unexpected happens. I've played Strike with some people who don't bring the same enthusiasm to the game that Manny shown above does, and it falls flat. Some games create an experience all on their own, but others — including Strike — are a facilitator of moments, assisting players in creating memories.

With Strike off the market in the United States and possibly in Europe (although I saw copies for sale at retailers in early 2017 while at the game fair in Cannes), Ravensburger has now released Impact: Battle of Elements, which is largely the same game. The box includes five fewer dice, so now players start with 5-8 dice instead of 6-9, and the box is smaller, although the floor of the arena is roughly the same size as the one in Strike.

The presentation of the game suffers from the smaller size, though, despite being mostly the same. The large golden bowl of Strike — which resembles an arena — creates a focal point for play; the box is a target for the eyes, then you have the target within a target. With Impact, you have only the box and its thin plastic insert, which resembles, well, a box. You lose the feeling of the arena, and with that the feeling of you being a spectator for some kind of dice-y combat.

The gameplay itself remains the same, so again as long as you're also doing your part, the game remains enjoyable. Beyond that, Impact has replaced the pips of the original dice with elemental symbols, and the game includes variant rules in which the starting symbol in the box affects what happens when you collect dice showing the symbol during play: stone makes you stack those claimed dice into a single object, and you'd throw them all in together on a future turn; fire makes everyone race to build a tower, with whoever does so first claiming the matching dice; and so on. I don't know whether this game needed special powers, but they exist for those who want it and easy to avoid for everyone else.