{"id":8316,"date":"2020-03-19T12:57:09","date_gmt":"2020-03-19T16:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8316"},"modified":"2020-03-19T13:00:54","modified_gmt":"2020-03-19T17:00:54","slug":"men-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/19\/men-at-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Men at Work."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I generally don’t play many ‘dexterity’ games, meaning games that have some kind of physical component inherent in the play, like Jenga or the 1800s game Crokinole. There are tons of these games on the market but most just aren’t very good, often asking players to do things that are too easy or too difficult, and usually just rewarding the player who had the most fortunate timing rather than rewarding some specific skill or strategy. That made it a surprise that I enjoyed the 2019 game Men at Work<\/a>, a dexterity game of stacking and especially of balancing, which builds in a way to keep you playing even if you make a mistake and gives players multiple things to do over the course of an entire game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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who can it be now?<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Men at Work, designed by Rita Lodl (who appears in the game on\none card as ‘Boss Rita’), has players building a construction site of girders\nand workers, where each player will get a specific instruction on their turn to\nplace one of those two things with some specific additions or restrictions,\nsuch as matching a girder to a color already on the site. The initial setup has\nthree girders and one or two workers on grey support blocks so that none of the\ngirders is touching the playing surface. On your turn, you add the girder or worker,\nsometimes also placing bricks or tiny beams on the arms of the workers as well,\nwhile trying to keep the structure balanced so that nothing slips or falls to\ntouch the table beneath. If any parts touch the table, you’ve caused an\naccident and must remove all such components, and then you lose one of your\nthree safety certificates. If you lose all three, you’re out of the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your moves are determined by a deck of two-sided cards. You\nflip a card to show two instructions, one for placing a girder and one for\nplacing a worker. The card left on top of the deck will show a girder symbol or\na hard-hat, telling you which instruction to follow, and two colors of girders,\nindicating you must place one of those colors or must place the new worker on a\ngirder of either color. About a quarter of the way through the deck, the Boss\nRita card will appear, after which the real scoring begins. If your move adds a\nnew highest point to the construction site, you get an employee of the week\ntoken; the first player to get N tokens, where N varies by the number of\nplayers from 4 tokens to 6, is the winner. If your move doesn’t add a new highest\npoint, which sometimes isn’t possible, you still must complete the move without\ncausing an accident or risk losing a safety certificate. Play continues until\nsomeone reaches the target number of employee of the week tokens, or only one\nplayer still has safety certificates remaining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one key rule in Men at Work is that you’re supposed to place\neverything on the structure using just one hand, which is hard enough to\nremember, let alone to execute. I played this with a seven-year-old who had no\nproblem at all understanding the rules \u2013 she only needed help with interpreting\ncard instructions that weren’t all that clear, such as the different cards that\nsay to put the worker on first and then add the bricks\/beams, and those that\nhave you put a brick\/beam on the worker and then put them all on a girder at\nonce \u2013 but I improvised and let her use two hands while I used just one. That\nwas enough to keep the game balanced (pun intended) until eventually the\nstructure got large enough that it was easy for one of us to knock almost the\nwhole thing down with one errant move. It took us about 20 minutes of actual\nplay time (not counting me reading the rules and looking up several cards for more\nexplanation) from start to finish, and there was a lot of laughing in the\nprocess too. It’s still not my preferred genre of game but this is high on my\nlist of titles you can play with kids of just about any age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I generally don’t play many ‘dexterity’ games, meaning games that have some kind of physical component inherent in the play, like Jenga or the 1800s game Crokinole. There are tons of these games on the market but most just aren’t very good, often asking players to do things that are too easy or too difficult, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,1166,455,696],"class_list":["post-8316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boardgames","tag-dexterity-games","tag-family-games","tag-games-2","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8316"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8321,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316\/revisions\/8321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}