Wriggle Roulette
- Board's Eye View
- May 9
- 2 min read
Wriggle Roulette, from Oink Games, is a kind of Russian Roulette with wooden snakes rather than bullets, and with considerably less likelihood of injury to any of the participants. It's an easy-to-play push-your-luck game for 2-8 players.
Inside the now-standard Oink compact box, there's a bag filled with 51 black eels and 17 red snakes (wooden components) and there's a good quantity of tokens used for keeping score - tho' these have different values on each side, which is always annoying because it's all too easy to knock a token and so confuse the scoring. (Note to publishers: we'd always prefer to have fewer tokens but all with values that are the same on both sides)
In Wriggle Roulette players are each turn drawing eels/snakes from the bag. You draw blind (no peeking!) but you decide for yourself how many you want to draw (0-6 in a two-player game; 0-4 with more than two players). Players keep their hands closed after drawing so that players can simultaneously reveal their hauls. You keep the eels you draw but the snakes go into a central pool. The eels are potentially worth points to the players who drew them but it's the total number of snakes drawn that determines when the round ends. The number of snakes that trigger a 'snake outbreak' varies with the number of players; it's just six snakes in a two-player game rising to all 17 snakes if you have eight players.
In the turn when the 'snake outbreak' is triggered, it's the player(s) who grabbed the most that turn - regardless of whether they actually drew snakes or eels - who lose. They score zero points for the round, while the other players score a point for each eel they've collected over the course of the round. If at any point a player chooses to draw nothing from the bag, they immediately score the eels they've drawn so far that round; their eels go back in the bag and they sit out the rest of the round. You're competing to have the most points, and the game ends when a player has finished a round having amassed 20 points.
That's the entire game. It could hardly be simpler, so this is a pocket-sized game that you can take with you and play anywhere with pretty much anyone - children and adults alike. You'll probably maximise your draw in the first couple of turns but will almost certainly want to be more cautious on subsequent turns as the number of snakes builds up and teeters perilously close to the 'snake outbreak' point...
Wriggle Roulette is designed by Bruno Faidutti and Jun Sasaki. Along with other titles from Oink Games, Wriggle Roulette is distributed in the UK by Hachette Boardgames UK.
