by Boardgameduck

Barbecubes is a dexterity game (the sequel to Tinderblox) that sees you carefully placing various food items onto a grill. If you drop food twice, you're out of the game!

To play, you set up the grill, placing the two wooden frames over the top of the tin. Place the food tokens in the lid of the tin, then shuffle the cards, and place them in a pile facedown. Players take turns drawing a card from the deck and placing the item in question on the grill. The cards show the item in question, which hand a player needs to use, and how many bars of the grill the food needs to touch.

Things I Liked:
🍖 The table presence is incredible. The theme and the components are so good. Anyone who has seen the game setup has loved the look and feel of it!
🍖 An unintended but much appreciated feature of the game is that the laser cut wooden pieces have a lovely smokey smell... which just fits the bbq theme so well!
🍖 The setup, learning, teaching, and gameplay are all super quick and easy. You can get going within a few minutes, and it's good for a wide audience range.
🍖 The small box and easy setup make this a perfect game to take out and about.

Things I Liked Less
🍽 I didn't feel the game was challenging enough. A few times, we were at a stalemate where there was just no space on the grill, meaning the next player had to place the item in a way that neeeed to make another piece fall off. This didn't reflect any skill of placing the tokens as there was no option, and it felt a little unfair.
🍽 I feel that the cards needed some more challenge; multiple food items being placed at a time, stacked. A cheese expansion would be a good bonus here to add additional items to the grill in a challenging way and would encourage items falling off in a more natural way.

Overall, this is a game with a stunning design. The theme and the gameplay fit really well. The only thing for me is that I'd like more of a challenge and more variety from the cards.

As a note, the game also has a vegetable theme instead of meat. This hasn't been played here to determine if there is much of a different challenge in the token shapes. I would be interested in merging the two potentially!

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