With a design by Olivier Mahy and art by Alexandre Bonvalot, publishers Sit Down! have certainly come up with a novelty: Dexterity Jane is a real-time dexterity game but one that relies on neither balance nor on flicking components!
So we've established that Dexterity Jane is no clone of Flick'em Up (Pretzel), so how does it work? The game takes 2–9 players and is played over 10 initially quick-fire rounds. Each round, cards are flipped showing a left or right hand with one or more digits folded in. Players are racing to be the first to precisely mirror the illustration(s) on the cards (ie: matching the hand(s) and folded fingers). The twist here is that the number of cards you flip and have to incorporate in your emulation increases with each round - so it starts off with 1 card but increases to 10 in the final round. We warned that the rounds were only initially quick fire: this is a game that slows as it progresses because players have an increasing amount of information to take in and they only get one shot per round of getting things exactly right.
If, like Board's Eye View editor Selwyn Ward, you suffer from trigger finger (yes, that's a real thing - who knew?) then this is a game you'll need to avoid. The rest of us can have a lot of fun playing this speed matching party game - especially when playing over a few drinks. The circular cards often mean that players are struggling to decode and assimilate images some of which are the wrong way up, which only adds to the chaos. And if you are playing as a drinking game, just be careful not to mistake the circular cards for beer mats! These are cards that you won't be able to sleeve.
As the number of cards increases, players will look out for those that cancel each other out (two cards with the same folded fingers and cards with all fingers outstretched - which override all the others for that hand). For some players tho', such coping mechanisms may not be enough. If you're in that category, designer Olivier Mahy has incorporated a simplified version that colour codes the hands to make it quicker and easier to distinguish left from right. There are also optional rules tho' for further stepping up the challenge - including 'shootouts' that enable players to steal scoring tokens from each other.
Love it or loathe it, you won't soon find any other games quite like Dexterity Jane!