Men At Work Review
Young man! There’s no need to feel down. I said, young man! Hook those men off the ground. I said, young man! If you want a new game, there’s no need to be unhappy.
It’s fun to play a game of Men at Work!
Players: 2-5
Time: 30-45 mins
Designer: Rita Modl
Artist: Bernard Bittler, Chris Quilliams
Publisher: Pegasus Spiele, Pretzel Games
Men at Work is the game that reminded me just how fun dexterity games can be. I had gotten it into my head that once you’ve played one stacking game, you’ve pretty much played them all. Jenga, bar a few tweaks to add an actual winner, pretty much had the “build a thing high” nailed down, I thought. But oh, what a difference a sense of humour makes.
This is the building site. I hope you’ve got your hard hat with you! We take safety very seriously around here. Any slips, spills, or catastrophic collapses must be tidied up immediately before work can continue. But we are a workplace that recognises accidents do happen. So we won’t fire you until your third infraction. No matter how many people die!
Pffthweeeeeeeeeeeeet
Ah that’s the shift change whistle! Go over to the deck of cards to get today’s assignment. One side of the cards shows what type of thing to place: either new girders or a new workman. The other side of the cards shows some modifiers, adding extra difficulty or restricting your options. Maybe you’ll need to place that new girder touching a previous purple girder. Maybe it will need to balance on only a single other girder. Look, I just build the thing, I leave the details like ‘legality’ or ‘sense’ to the architect.
The workmen may seem like the easy part of your job, I mean, surely those strongly footed, thick wooden pieces are going to stand proud on the girders. Well… mostly. Of course the real issue is that they are often expected to be carrying supplies. Wooden beams or the dreaded sticky red brick. OK that sounds worse than it is. They aren’t sticky they’re just… a little hard to let go of, you know? When your big clumsy hands are shaking right next to the workman balanced precariously above a 200ft/6in drop. There’s just a devilish bit of tackiness keeping your sweating fingers adhering to the brick long after you wanted it resting on the workman’s awkwardly diverted arms.
I never knew material choice could make such a difference to how a game plays. Just think. The coefficient of friction between the girder and the workman’s feet decides whether he will slide down the slope or hold steady and let me tell you, it doesn’t take much slope to send a worker skating down towards gravity’s sweet embrace.
Accidents are inevitable. Only the scale of the disaster is unpredictable. Of course the player responsible loses a safety certificate and has to organise flowers for the funerals. But to lighten the mood, the next player in turn order gets passed a cardboard hook with which to make the site safe again. And if anything else collapses in the process they too lose a safety certificate! And on the hook travels. ‘Safe’ means no pieces of the construction touching the ground. Does that mean pulling things off the site (or in the case of the workman, hosing/scraping off…) or carefully lifting pieces back onto the wooden base blocks? That is up to you to figure out.
But it’s not all about avoiding accidents. Playing it safe doesn’t win architectural awards. And nor is it going to impress the foreman who will appear from the deck mid game to watch you burly men (or not) at work. And the foreman is a lady. Hyup! Look lively lads!
Being Men at Work the only way you have of earning her approval and a coveted… employee of the month award is to thrust your pieces as high into the air as possible. Place your girder or workman so that it is the highest point in the construction. Here we are. The rule that makes Men at Work work. The force that drives stupid decisions and huge risks and brings about the hilarious collapses central to the appeal of all stacking games. Because it is obviously implausibly hard to keep placing higher! But it will be pulling off the implausible that wins you the game.
Men at Work has been the biggest surprise hit of the year for me. It was so fun. So much more fun than I expected. Because unlike other stacking games I’ve played, it takes a theme and runs. Only it knows how ridiculous the situation is, so with a big ol’ wink to the camera it runs straight into a large sheet of glass carried by two workmen and lets the theme spin wildly through space for maximum comedic effect. Loved it.
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