Lunch Break Games: Super Skill Pinball: 4-Cade (2020)
You control the ball! Kind of?
Roll & writes are great fit for break time games - they usually don’t take up that much table space and can be played in under an hour.
One of my favorite thing with roll & writes/flip & write style games is they are usually about combos. It’s so fun to check off one box that lets you check off another box which gives you another bonus.
Super Skill Pinball is FULL of those moments and to make it even better, each box comes with four different games!
Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade has 4 different “machines” with scaling levels of complexity - Carniball, Cyberhack, Dragonslayer and Dance Fever. There are 4 copies of each board in the box, 2 balls per player (in case of multiball) 2 dice, and 4 markers so the game can play up to 4 (though there is no player interaction so the limit is merely set by the physical components in the box).
I will say by the time we got to the DragonSlayer board, we were pushing the lunchtime boundaries. The more complex the boards became, the more chances for ways to maximize your time bouncing a round, getting bonus actions and earning you way into other zones.
So how do you play? You roll the dice and then pick one of the dice to be your “result”. The ball starts usually near the top (there’s a yellow arrow that shows where it enters) and you continue to roll and choose numbers as it falls down the machine. If a number is not available, the ball falls further down and if it hits the flippers and nothing matches there, then it is lost!
Of course, you could attempt to nudge the dice, mimicking when players would physically push a machine in an arcade to manipulate the ball. You can +/- the die results as much as you want, but be careful because if on your next roll the difference between the two dice is less than your nudge, the machine has tilted and you lose your ball immediately.
The mechanics of each board change a little bit as new features appear - for example, Carniball is just the main pinball machine, but in Cyberhack, you can earn your way to a separate zone by completing the RUN zone.
The biggest challenge to this game is remembering to track every little bit of VP you pick up along the way. Every bumper you hit is a point, sometimes two if you’ve activate a power. Other score multipliers will have you diligently counting out each star to make sure no point is left behind.
But it is SO satisfying to watch those points wrack up - just like when you’re at a real pinball machine and the ball is perfectly balanced between a set of bumpers, going back and forth as the points just keep going up.
There are already 3 more games of Super-Skill Pinball out there and a 4th was announced this month! I’m not sure if I need that much pinball on my shelf but at the same time, I am curious about what the other board offer!
The quality of the components makes this an easy one to pick up and take with you. Everything is dry erase and it would work well at home, at work, or at a hotel or camping trip or even a Convention center floor.