3 bizarre board games from around the world
Imagine this: It’s a rainy day, and you are playing a board game with your friends or family in the comfort of your warm home. Sounds cosy, right? Countless games exist worldwide, including the popular ones like Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Scrabble among others. However, some board games can be bizarre. Here are three such weird board games!
Snifty Snakes: Players use their nose for this game
This game comes with a raised board and many holes. The players are needed to insert cones into them. The winner is the one who finishes this work first. Each player is given three cones. However, they are not allowed to use their hands. So, how will they play? A player must wear a set of plastic spectacles with a long, flexible snake attached to the nose with which they have to insert the cones into the holes. As you may expect, the flexible snake makes this incredibly challenging. A Canadian company – Action Games and Toys – first released this bizarre dexterity game in 1975. Although the designer remains unnamed, he or she was undoubtedly a fun person!
Los Mampfos: A game that involves donkey poop
This game actually tests your memory. It comes with three wooden donkeys, a circular track (board), playing cards and circular discs in five colours. The donkeys have two openings, one near their mouth and one behind their tail. Each player is given playing cards. The donkeys move around the track and are fed with the circular discs using the playing cards. After each round, a poop card is drawn. At this point, each player lifts the donkeys and removes the discs from their rare opening. Each player is required to guess the colour of the disc their donkey ate the most based on their memory. They count the number of discs in the colour they guessed and the discs of the colour they picked and feed the rest of the discs (of other colours) back to the donkeys. This process goes on for several rounds. In the end, the person with the most discs wins the game. Los Mampfos, developed by board game designer Maja Dorn and the award-winning German game designer Rüdiger Dorn, was released by the French publisher Gigamic in 2006. Although weird, the game was nominated for prestigious awards, including the coveted Spiel des Jahres Kinderspiel, which roughly translates to German Children’s Game of the Year.
Ugg-Tect: It allows you to whack your teammates
In this game, you get various cards with pictures of different building and blocks of different shapes and sizes needed to construct the structures. Finally, you get two inflatable cubs too. The game of Ugg-Tect involves several teams. In each team, there is one architect and the rest of the members are cavemen. Each team is required to build a tall structure with the blocks provided in the game. The architect provides instructions using a card to other members (cavemen) on which block will go first and where in the building. The team to build a structure first wins. Sounds easy right? But here is the catch! The architect is not allowed to speak. He or she must convey the instruction via nonverbal clues such as actions or by making specific sounds mentioned in the game. Some of the actions used are raising your hands, stomping your feet, shouting and mumbling. What makes the game even more hilarious is that the architect can whack other team members: Once if they get the clue right and twice if they make a mistake. Multiple publishers released the Ugg-Tect game in 2009. This list of publishers includes Fantasy Flight Games, one of the biggest game-producing companies in the world. Walter Obert, a renowned Italian designer, developed the design for the game.