Bausack board game is take place in top 10 best kids games, best party games, Family games, card games, word games, indoor games.
“Bausack” is German for “building sack,” and Bausack is a sack of bricks. A large, heavy cotton sack with knobbly projections from its contents, it makes wooden clacking sounds when it moves. You empty out the contents and the bricks cascade onto the table or onto the floor in a glorious, anarchic rush. And instantly your mind is filled with possibilities. What can we do with these things? What can we build? How can we play?
Bausack is that most wondrous of things: a game that is also a toy; a game that has no one true set of rules; a game that reminds us of the great games of our childhood when there were no limits except our imagination. It combines physical and mental play into an experience where strategy, psychology, and an under- standing of physics are as important as a steady hand. It is a delight.
The cotton sack contains about 70 wooden bricks. In the original edition most of them are plain wood, but some are red and a small number are green. Crucially, they are all different. No two are the same. There are large rectangles, small rectangles, squares, cubes, cylinders, poles, ramps, L-shapes, arches, eggs, half-eggs, circles and hemispheres, crosses, pieces with holes in them, pieces that defy description, and pieces that are unmistakably doorknobs, eggcups, and a model Christmas tree.
They’re all made from a good, solid hardwood with smooth surfaces, and they demand to be picked up and held, stroked, played with, and balanced on each other. And that’s where the heart of Bausack lies. It’s a tower-building game.
In fact, it’s a whole universe of tower-building games, or more precisely a toolkit for designing tower-building games.
Everything you need to become a games designer is in Bausack. The designers also supply a measuring tool (a piece of string with a clothespeg on it); a second, smaller cotton bag filled with kidney beans; and one of the most charming sets of rules I’ve ever read. It includes five suggested game-types, covering a wide range of possibilities and variants. In the first and most basic — Tower of Babel, aimed at players from five years and up — the players take it in turns to choose a piece from the bag and add it to a communal tower. If someone causes a collapse, the player immediately before them receives one bean. First player with five beans wins. Simple and fun.
The second set of rules, Baukette, introduces the ideas of each player building his or her own tower, of limiting the choice of bricks, and of last-man-standing. The competition is to create the tower with the most bricks in it. If you’ve fur- rowed your brow and asked why the players are not competing for height, then you’re already thinking like a Bausack owner.
By the third set of rules, Knock Out, proper strategy has been introduced. Again, players are each building their own towers. The beans are used to bid against other players for the blocks in an auction. Knock Out isn’t about creating the tower with the most bricks, it’s about survival. Using your beans to build the smallest, simplest tower is a viable strategy here.
But Knock Out has two kinds of auction. In the simple one, players take turns to choose a piece and auction it, participating in the bidding themselves. Unsold pieces must be taken by the auctioneer. The second auction is a “refuse” auction; the piece offered is a hard-to-use one, and each player must increase the bid or be forced to use the piece himself. Crucially, the plain-colored pieces are quite easy to build into a tower. Red ones are harder because they are curved, have only one flat surface, or their flat parts are small or at sharp angles. Green pieces are even harder to use. Suddenly you’re managing two different resources: the physi- cal tower in front of you, and the beans you need to optimize your architectural masterpiece.
I’ll mention here the rule that all beans spent in auctions go back into the bag. But why? Why aren’t they given to the auctioneer? Would that work better? Does keeping currency in the game unbalance things? Why not try it out, see how it affects the dynamics of play — does it destabilize more than the towers? Bausack doesn’t ask these questions about the rules outright, but it invites you, the player, to ask them and experiment with them, just as you’re experimenting with the design of your brick tower.
There are still two variants to go. Well Stacked is the first game to introduce the idea of building for height, which again completely changes the dynamic of the gameplay and the value of the different pieces. It also introduces a third auction type, the “risk” auction, which in turn adds yet another rule idea: players can be forced to build on each other’s towers. The final set is the simply named 3 x Red Wins, a tactical two-player game with basic auctions, each piece placed must increase the overall height of the tower, and the first player with three red pieces in his or her uncollapsed tower wins.
How many other variants can you think of immediately?
Bausack is closely related to Blockhead (a Games magazine hall-of-famer) but beats it on many levels, not least of all because its pieces are made of nicer wood, and in less garish colors, than any edition of Blockhead I’ve seen. Milton Bradley’s Bandu was a version of Bausack but with only one set of rules, which rather misses the point. After the original 1987 release, Zoch Games created a second version, Sac Noir, in natty red and black colors with a slightly changed set of pieces. A 2007 boxed version included the cotton sack and some of the Sac Noir bits, but replaced the kidney beans with blue glass gems. The rules, thank- fully, were almost unchanged.
What Bausack boils down to is a toolkit for Games Design 101. All the ele- ments of the five rules sets provided in the basic game can be broken down and then mixed and matched to create new games. Bausack almost demands that you play with its rules, the same way that the lovely wooden pieces demand that you pick them up and play with them. For example, I mentioned that some of the pieces, the hardest ones to place, are colored green. None of the five sets of rules refer to them. How do you use green pieces in the game? If you don’t have any ideas of your own, ask an eight-year-old.
Plus, it’s huge fun, a crowd-puller at gatherings of games-players, a visual and tactile treat, a toy in its own right, and a surprisingly strategic game of collabora- tive-yet-competitive building. Just don’t — whatever you do — jog the table.
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