Can You Build the Ultimate Campfire in Tinderblox?

Work together to build a campfire, log by log and cube by cube. But the best fire builder will earn the title of Best Camper, so the game is on!

Published by Alley Cat Games, Tinderblox is a dexterity game designed for 2-6 players, with a playtime of 3-15 minutes.

Gameplay

The campfire card is placed in the center of the table. You place three log tokens in the spaces indicated on the card to form the beginning of the campfire, then begin the game with players taking turns. When it is your turn, you reveal the top card of the deck. This will show 1-3 components: logs and/or fire cubes. Using only the tweezers, you remove the indicated components from the game’s tin box, stack them as indicated by the card, and then add them to the campfire. Some cards will have you doing so with the tweezers held in your non-dominant hand.

If any of your pieces fall, but not onto the campfire card, you simply use the tweezers to retrieve them and continue trying to add them to the campfire. If any piece falls onto the campfire card, or you cause any piece that is already part of the campfire to fall off the fire, you are out of the game. If you successfully place the pieces, it is now the next player’s turn.

The last player left in the game is the winner. If more than one player is still in the game after you have gone through all the cards in the deck, these players share the victory.

Review

Tinderbox is a very light and extremely fast game, and quite an enjoyable one, as well. It plays so fast, and you can be eliminated quite quickly. But at the same time, while the game is competitive, there is a sense of shared triumph the bigger the fire grows.

There is also just something incredibly fun about playing with the tweezers. It provides a great tactile element, can offer a bit more precision than when you’re simply using your fingers to place things, and is just plain fun to play with.

Between the components and the artwork, the game looks nice as well. It’s got a cozy aesthetic that complements its cozy theme. The rules are short and sweet, but could have used just a little bit more text to clarify how you’re supposed to read the cards. A few visual examples, just to confirm how exactly you have to stack components when adding more than one to the fire, would have been helpful.

The game is also extremely portable, as it comes in such a small tin that’s no bigger than the size of your hand. You wouldn’t want to play this anywhere you could easily lose pieces, but it would be easy to play at a restaurant or in a hotel, and it’s both small and light enough that it would be easy to pack in a purse or bag.

Tinderbox is a fun little dexterity game. You’re not going to spend all evening playing it, but it fills a spot that can sometimes be challenging to find a good game for: when you only want something to last a handful of minutes. It’s suspenseful, nicely challenging, and compact.

Pros: Component quality, size, playtime

Cons: Rules could have been a little more detailed

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.