Yubibo Review – Chaotic Party Fun

Kicking off 日本のゲーム祭り (Nihon no gēmu matsuri) or ‘Japanese Game Festival‘ here on Punchboard, we’re taking a look at the party game chaos of Yubibo from Jelly Jelly Games. The aim of this Japanese games festival is to showcase some recent Japanese board and card games that you might not otherwise hear about, and some more about the designers and publishers. Some will be easier to get hold of than others, depending on where you live, but at least you’ll know what’s out there.

If I had to describe Yubibo in a sentence, it would be “Midair co-operative Kerplunk Jenga”. If your brain is struggling to imagine what that looks like in reality, then I understand. So, let me explain.

The players all sit around a (preferably quite small) table. Between them is a shared deck of cards, a pile of sticks, and in the advanced game, some foam balls. Each player has a colour assigned to them, which is shown by a card in front of them. Everyone chooses one hand to play the game with, and the other hand is used to flip cards and place sticks.

On your turn, you flip a card from deck which shows the colour of the player you have to play with, and the digit on your hand you need to use. So you pick up a stick and brace it between the two players. One of them has to use the finger or thumb from the card, the other gets to choose. Then the next player clockwise has to do the same, and so on, and so on. As the game goes on, this crazy midair lattice starts to form, and this is where things start to get tricky.

Let’s imagine a scenario where I’ve got sticks pressed against all of my fingers. I flip a card and it tells me I’ve got to use my ring finger against the finger of somebody sat right next to me. Somehow I’ve got to do a couple of things now. I need to find space on my finger to actually place the end of the stick, and then I’ve got to find a way to apply pressure against the new stick, without reducing the pressure I’m exerting on any of the other sticks. On top of that, I’ve got to find the space to place that stick among the ten others criss-crossing the shared tabletop void.

Things get crazy. They get crazy quickly. Sod’s law says that the one person who doesn’t need another stick will be the one the whose card comes up. It seems to happen way more often than a random shuffle should allow. Someone up there likes to laugh at our struggles. If this all sounds too easy for you, maybe because you and your friends are structural engineers, there’s a way to ramp things up. The game includes six light foam balls. If you play with these, you can choose to place a ball instead of a stick, but each pair of sticks can only support one ball, balls can’t touch one another, nor can they touch fingers. It sounds easy, but given how light and plain fickle the balls are, it’s really tricky.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, Yubibo is a quick, light party game. It’s a terrific ice-breaker, one which I tested by visiting a nearby games night and playing it with six other people I’d never met before. There are few things as good at mixing strangers as daft dexterity games, and Yubibo is a daft dexterity game through and through.

It’s amazing how much more difficult the game is than it looks. Instinctively, it looks simple. Braced sticks are braced, right? Well, no, because what you don’t realise is that the act of exerting pressure is a conscious one, but it’s an act that you forget you’re doing. On top of that, towards the end of a game, you can find yourself exerting pressure in at least five different directions with your fingers and thumbs, while everyone else is simultaneously doing the same thing.

If you like silly co-operative party games, Yubibo is a must. It’s fast, stupid, cheap, stupid, well-made, stupid, engaging and stupid. I love it. It’s absolute nonsense of the best kind, and I highly recommend it.

How to buy it

Yubibo is published by Jelly Jelly Games, which is a part of Jelly Jelly Cafe, a string of board game cafes across Japan. As you might imagine, it’s not the sort of game you’re going to find on the shelves of major chains. They have an online store here, and according to boardgameprices.co.uk, three UK retailers have it for pre-order, so maybe a small distribution is coming. Other than that, you should be able to find it at larger conventions in your part of the world.

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