Designed by: Cédric Millet
Meeple Circus is a stacking game where every player is putting on a show for an audience. Over three rounds (two rehearsals, and a final show) everyone firstly gathers meeples (little wooden people, but also, in this game, little wooden animals, balls, planks, etc) and then has a limited amount of time (around 2 minutes) to stack their pieces in the most valuable, point-scoring ways, in one or more stacks. Everyone starts with a blue acrobat (1pt if on the ground supporting something) and a yellow acrobat (1pt if not on the ground!) and hopes to use their additional pieces that match goals on a set of four cards. Each card shows a formation the crowd would like to see, and if you pull it off, you get the points on the cards in question. If you have a red acrobat they’ll score points for being right at the top of your stack – the higher the better!
In each round there are bonus points for finishing first and second too, and in round two the special guests appear (specialist meeples who score points when stacked in a particular way) before in the final round players will score points for adding some element of physical or verbal performance to their show – introducing their meeples, bowing at certain times, and so on. After the final round, the player with the most points wins.
None, except the fickle hand of fate (or your own, clumsier hands)
Pretty much zero
Almost non-existent - copy the cards, get the points. Try to get yellow acrobats off the ground and blue ones on it. Red acrobat at the top, special guests in their positions... that's pretty much it - but do it fast!
If you like the dexterity challenge and listening to the soundtrack (Meeple Circus uses an app) over and over, it's light on the rules but with some decent variation as to what and how you stack.
2-5
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
A fun little jaunt into stacking that engineers a nice build up across the three rounds from easy to moderate to imminent disaster, as in each round you'll have successively more pieces and more potential boxes to tick. The app plays the classic circus music in the background to add an element of fun/insanity (delete as appropriate) and like most stacking games, it's designed to try and make you fail. It was fun, and funny, but my favourite stacking game (albeit with some house rules) is Bandu, and Meeple Circus hasn't come close to that.