Fakir is a game that will remind many of the 1967 release Kerplunk, the stick and marble game most my age will recall from their childhood.
There are no marbles in Fakir, but you are placing and pulling sticks with the hopes of eliminating those of opponents and not your own.
This another quick game from designer Philippe Proux and Ludarden that quite impressed.
Like all efforts through Ludarden Fakir is an all wood game, this one supporting two to four players. Interestingly, it seems to work quite well with three, which is rarely the case with perfect information games that tend to skew toward having a kingmaker when playing with three.
The game has a large block drilled with a number of horizontal and vertical holes.
It is into the holes that players place their sticks. In a two-player game each player has 10, three-player they have seven and four-player only five.
You can only place sticks unless you have two in place vertically, at which time you can pull a vertical stick in hopes of dropping a vertical stick until it disappears into the block, thus being eliminated from the game.
If you pull your own stick out, it returns to your supply. Pull an opponent’s piece you then get to replace one of your vertical sticks with the one pulled, which is important if you have a piece threatened by elimination.
This is not an overly complex game to be sure, and it wouldn’t hold interest if you were playing it for a couple of hours at a sitting. However, a game is 15-20 minutes and two or three play throughs are certainly fun when you want to just wind down a night of gaming with a light, without luck game.
Check it out at www.ludarden.com
Thanks to fellow gamers Trevor Lyons and Adam Daniels for their help in running through this game for review.
