Junk Drawer hits the any audience mark

 I make it a point to try and learn at least one new game a month. It was getting to the middle of April and life had been too crazy for me to feel like learning anything. So I used one of my ‘break-glass-in-case-of-emergency’ methods and went to Board Game Arena to find a game to learn.

And, as it happens, Junk Drawer turned out to be a dandy little game.

Junk Drawer is a fill-in-the-grid-with-polygons game. Which is a genre that has no end of examples. Mind you, Blokus was a big deal for me when I first got into gaming and I still think Blokus Trigon is one of the best three-player abstracts that I’ve ever played.

So, I’m prepared to be sold but you got to give me a reason to buy in. (Did that sentence even make sense?)

The theme of Junk Drawer is organizing junk drawers. While not as exciting as World War IV or trading in the Mediterranean, it’s a theme that everyone can relate to. 

Everyone gets a set of twenty-one tiles, all the Blokus shapes except they have images of different types of bric a brac printed on them. There’s a set of cards of the tiles. Cards get shuffled and flipped and you place the matching tile. Boom, you know how to play.

So what’s the hook? What’s the clever bit? 

You don’t have one board. You have four five-by-five boards. And each one is going to have a different scoring condition, drawn from twenty-four possible scoring conditions. And each round of the game is four moves, placing a tile in each different grid.

That kicks things up a notch. Heck, maybe two notches.

None of these elements make the game add any real difficulty to learning or understanding the game. At the same time, it’s adds a lot to the decisions and replayability of the Junk Drawer. They add depth more than complexity.

Honestly, the closest thing the game has to a problematic element is that as soon as any player can’t make a legal move, the game ends for everyone. However, some of the scoring conditions do better with emptier drawers so forcing the end can be a strategic choice, as opposed to being a spoiler.

In short, Junk Drawer is a very intuitive game with a wide open decision tree that is easy to understand. Personally, I think it’s quite a bit of fun. It is a very solid family weight game.

I will keep on playing it online and, if I see a cheap copy, I would seriously think about picking it up. I think my whole family would have fun with it.

[Since then, I also learned Chateau, another polygon on grid games. Which I like even more, due to a number of little twists it throws at you. That said, everything I’ve written about Junk Drawer is true and I think it would work better for a family game night]