Game Overview: Schnipp & Weg, or Flex Your Fingers

Whenever I look at The Hotness on BGG, I notice that most of the games included are fairly complex — and while many BGGers would disagree, this label includes titles like Wingspan, Living Forest, and The Castles of Burgundy. Having hosted Meetup events with random attendees and taught games to exchange students and extended family, I know the threshold for what makes a game complex is far lower than what most gamers think.

Thankfully, I have no end of choices when looking for something to play with casual gamers, with dexterity games being a nice go-to choice as they tend to be rules light, with their complexity arising in you having a hard time making your body do whatever it needs to do.

One example of this genre is Schnipp & Weg — roughly, "Snap & Away" or "Snap & Gone" — by Dieter Zander, who first released the game in 2012 through his own Historische Spiele Zander before Clemens Gerhards licensed the design for re-release in 2021.

Zander's first edition, named Kosakenschubsen, or "Jostling Cossacks"

Here's an almost complete description of the game:

Quote:

Schnipp & Weg is a flicking game for two players that's played on a game board shaped like an hourglass.

Each player starts on one end of the board with nine pieces of their own color. On a turn, you flick one of your pieces at one or more of the opponent's pieces, and if you manage to knock at least one opposing piece from the board while not flying off yourself, you take another turn; otherwise, the opponent takes their turn.

If you manage to remove all of the opposing pieces, you start the game again, but with you now having eight pieces instead of nine and with those pieces being one level closer to the center of the game board. Each round that you win, you start with one fewer piece and one level closer to the center. If you win a round after starting on the fifth row with only five pieces, then you win the game.

The only rule not included above is that if your last piece leaves the board on the same flick that the opponent's last piece leaves the board, then you re-play the round. The rules don't detail what constitutes a flick, whether you can re-flick a barely moved piece, whether you can move around the table, and so on. You can figure out all of those things with your opponent because your tastes will differ from others, and honestly those details don't matter outside of a Schnipp & Weg tournament, which I imagine is unlikely to take place anytime soon.

I'm about to get schnipped...

The beauty of this game is that I can teach it to my son or in-laws in seconds. Set up the pieces, tell them to flick a piece to try to knock me off the board without falling off yourself, give them lots of practice shots, then go. They still might not enjoy the game, as evidenced in this video, but they pick up the gameplay immediately and don't feel lost, which is a situation I had encountered many times until I recalibrated my internal complexity scale to try to meet players where they are.

What's more, being simple doesn't correspond to being easy. I've won only one of the five games I've played on this purchased copy, and in that one game somehow things just came together for me and I was making shots that were impossible for me in other playings.

Clemens Gerhards edition (tray not included)

The bottleneck game board nicely encompasses two invisible game design elements: First, you naturally get a feeling of progression as you move up the board and can fit fewer pieces in your current row. Success! And yet now your opponent has fewer pieces that they need to remove in order to advance, similar to how every success in Kris Burm's YINSH removes one of your pieces from play, increasing the difficulty of you continuing to advance.

Second, not all pieces are equally useful, with the edgemost pieces being unable to zip across empty space from one side of the hourglass to the other, no matter how much my son thinks he can make it happen, which adds a tiny challenge to each round depending on which pieces end up where.

I love the craft that Clemens Gerhards puts into its releases, and I wish they were more widely available — the only U.S. retailer I've located is The Wooden Wagon, which is where I purchased this game and which no longer even lists the title — but at the same time, I know this type of production can't be scaled up easily, so perhaps these titles will remain a SPIEL treat for me in the future.

For demonstrations of play, including a full game complete with sharp and sloppy shots, check out the video below: