Junk Drawer is another entry in the world of polyomino (think Tetris) tile-laying games, this one with a relatable theme – you’re trying to organize your junk drawer, which has 21 uniquely-shaped items in it, across four sections, each of which has a different requirement for scoring. The scoring changes each game and the order in which you place those items is random, so the challenge is new each time. I thought the way the game ended was completely backwards, however, and a lot of the scoring cards are needlessly arcane.
The concept here is pretty simple: Each player has those 21 tiles, each with its own shape and size, and each depicting a different item you might find in a junk drawer. (Guilty as charged.) Each player also has a board of four 5×5 sectors, and at the start of the game, the players draw scoring cards for each sector – so every player’s top left sector will score in the same way as every other’s, but their top right sectors will have their own scoring rubric, and so on. To play one round, the players draw the top four cards from the shuffled deck of 21, and then flip those four over one at a time. As you might have guessed, each card shows one of those items. Each player must place that tile somewhere on their board. The next three cards are flipped, and players must place those as well, but can’t place any item in a sector they’ve already used in this round, meaning that for the fourth item of a round, the players have only one choice.
That’s the whole game, and it is very simple to learn and quick to play, while suitable for kids under 10 as well (my 7-year-old had no problem grasping it). The game ends when one player can’t place a tile, which is fine – Planet Unknown, another tile-laying game, ends the same way – but here there is no penalty or drawback for being the first player to bust. It ends up rewarding players who aren’t very efficient at laying their tiles, and it’s counterintuitive to play that way, which is where I think younger and less experienced players will be at a disadvantage. I’ve seen comments from the designer that this is intentional and means that the optimal strategy is to try to “go out” when you think you have a high enough score. I understand this, but it feels very wrong to me.
The scoring cards come in easy, medium, and hard levels. The easy ones are straightforward – one point for every space you’ve covered in a sector, one point for every space you haven’t covered, three points if each if you cover the center space and each corner, and so on. They get more convoluted, and ridiculous, as they increase in difficulty, such as scoring for every row and column with exactly two spaces filled. Again, I understand the design here, but to me those sorts of scoring rules turn the game into work rather than play, and it feels like the designers were trying to make more of the game than is actually there.
Anyone can house-rule a game, and you can do that with Junk Drawer to play it as a light family title. The rules even suggest a variant where players continue playing until each can no longer legally place a tile, which I think is at least fairer than the standard rules. I’d probably stick to the easy and medium cards, and be judicious about which ones I use depending on who’s playing. I have to admit that Junk Drawer just didn’t do it for me, though – there are too many better games in this genre, like Patchwork, Isle of Cats, or New York Zoo.