Wriggle Roulette
Designed by: Bruno Faidutti,Jun Sasaki
Wriggle Roulette is a party game packed into a tiny box. The goal is to pull most eels out of a bag – but if you’re caught being greedy, you might end up with nothing.
The game coms with 51 eels (black) and 17 snakes (red), which all go into a big cloth bag. All players play each turn: the bag is passed around the table and everyone plunges their hand in and grabs what they hope will be eels, keeping whatever you take locked in your fist for now. Note that there is no rummaging about in the bag or carefully counting: you have to be quick. The caveat here is you don’t want to take too many.
When all players have taken a turn everyone reveals their haul at the same time.
Anyone who has taken more than four eels/snakes must put everything back into the bag and gets nothing. Anyone else keeps their eels in front of them – as potential points – and places any snakes centrally on the table. You can ‘cash out’ in any turn by taking nothing from the bag (-you still put your hand in and reveal as normal) and take points equal to your collected eels, before returning them all to the bag. Assuming there aren’t too many snakes (-see below) a new turn now begins.
However!
If during the reveal there are now too many snakes the current round concludes. How many is too many varies depending on the number of players: in a four-player game, for example, it’s nine or more. When this happens, anyone who took the most eels this round loses all their eels, both in their hands and collected in front of them. Everyone else can cash their eels in for points, and everything – all eels and snakes – goes back in the bag before the next round starts. When a player reaches 20 points that is the winning condition – but other players can keep playing to try and make a bigger score until the current round ends!
Sam says
I’ve enjoyed my plays of Wriggle Roulette but, to indulge my po-faced critiquing for a moment, it feels more like a curio to me than a bona fide hit. Partly that’s because, compared to some, it’s a little protracted with the bag-passing and revealing and counting up and distributing of points (not helped by the fact the points chits have different values on each side), and partly because that protraction feels more palpable at higher player counts: for a party game it seems odd that it works best with 3 or 4, and I think it lacks the boisterous feel of Pictomania, say, or have the immediacy of something like Ca$h n Gun$. I think my default luck-pushing game would be Incan Gold, which not only plays faster but manages to radiate theme as well. All that said, however, Wriggle Roulette is not a bad game and there are definitely some funny moments in each play. The bag-plunging mechanic is markedly different and the reveals are often tense. It’s not a game I would shout about, but it’s certainly not one I’d object to more plays of either.
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Take That!
None
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Fidget Factor!
Very low
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Brain Burn!
There's a tiny side-order of calculus, but it's mainly a push-your-luck game
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Again Again!
It's not a game that offers a huge amount of variety, but it always seems to raise some laughs
