Game Review: Pulling Strings

By W. Eric Martin
July 30, 2008

Publisher: Blue Panther
Designer: Clark D. Rodeffer
Players: 2
Ages: 7+
Playing Time: 15-30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $23

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Eight

Clark Rodeffer’s Pulling Strings, created for a 2003 About.com design competition involving simultaneous movement, is one of several dozen themeless offerings available online at Super Duper Games, but this design made the transition from electrons to wood in late 2007 thanks to Blue Panther and its owner Steve Jones.

Blue Panther’s games all have the unusual hook of being composed entirely of wood, from the paper rules and generic wood bits to custom-made tile racks and engraved boxes. The look is unique, and Jones builds the games to order, allowing him to run a business with almost no inventory other than raw components.

No Strings Attached

Despite the title, all the strings in Pulling Strings are metaphysical ones, strings of the mind, as it were, instead of actual twine. Twine isn’t wood, after all. The game consists of a small board with a 5x5 grid burned into it, a set of 26 letter tiles, and a plethora of wooden discs. To set up, you arrange five letters along each edge of the board and stack five discs in the central intersection on the grid.

Each turn, players simultaneously write down a letter, then reveal them. The letters stand in for the strings; when you choose a letter, you pull all the discs in the line leading away from the letter toward that letter. Your opponent is also choosing a letter, though, and a stack of discs at the intersection of the two strings being pulled will be split, with half the stack going in each direction. When a stack has an odd number of discs, as at the start of the game, you first add a disc to the stack, then perform the split. Thus, discs are dripped onto the board one by one, giving both players more bits to drag around.

Your goal is to have a total of five discs on your four scoring spaces at the end of a turn. As soon as you do this, you win the game. Discs aren’t locked in, however, so an opponent can undo your work by pulling the discs away from you – assuming you don’t take any counter-measures, that is.

Second-, Third- and Fourth-Guessing

Getting into an opponent’s mind is key in Pulling Strings as the game has no randomness or chance elements; everything boils down to the intentions of the two players, and if you guess what the other player might do, you can potentially use that knowledge to your benefit. If discs sit on the edge of the board, for example, you can pull the string closest to them and the discs will bump against the edge of the wall and stay in place, as with a boat against the dock. If the opponent tugs on a string connected to that stack at the same time you’re trying to pull it off-board, half the discs will stay in place.

Even trickier, if you pull on the same string as your opponent, the discs move as normal, then the string snaps due to excess tension. To represent this, you remove the letter from play, which means that discs can no longer move in that direction. Removing those movement options can hamstring an opponent because a move that would previously take one pull of the string will now take three. (Think of a square with one edge missing. To move between adjacent vertices that lack an edge, you have to instead travel over the remaining three edges.)

Correctly guessing what an opponent will do can lead to a snapped string and a better position for you – but if your opponent does something else, pulling that string might benefit her instead while she’s simultaneously doing something to advance her position as well. Once you become aware of the potential for poisoned pulling, the game can wade into the “I know that you know that I know...” zone of play, with you trying to outthink the other player. In most of my games, however, this situation arose only a couple of times, when a player’s strategy crossed paths with an opponent’s, and the player had to choose whether to go positive or negative.

Pulling Up Short

The disappearing scoring space trick

• While the first few moves of each game are perfunctory, with few options open to you, as the game progresses and discs start spreading to all corners, you can potentially dive deep into thought to try to weigh every option. That said, my opponents and I must play less thoughtfully than Rodeffer and the publisher as only one of my games has come close to being 15 minutes long. (The playing time above come from the Blue Panther website; the box itself lists the playing time at 20-40 minutes.)

• Your reaction to the graphic design will depend on whether or not you appreciate the look and smell of bare wood. The aroma of the engraved wood arises anew each time I open the box, which is an interesting change from “new card deck” smell.

  The overall look is practical, not flashy, but one drawback is that the scoring spaces are hidden by the discs. Yes, you know that the scoring spaces are there and Player A has X points from the discs present on those spaces, but all three of my opponents mentioned this as a drawback because you have to remember this aspect instead of just being able to see it. Ideally Blue Panther could alter the board layout to add a half-circle and rectangle along the outer edge of the board, or perhaps larger scoring spaces in the grid, so that players absorb the board situation at a glance.

• The ASL (American Sign Language) representations of the Roman alphabet are pictured on the reverse of each letter tile, which is a cute idea but hardly the educational boon that the rules make it out to be. While players can do a “1-2-3-shoot” style of letter calling with the ASL symbols, they won’t know what letters they’re making unless they pause to turn over the tiles each turn. (That’s one way to get to a thirty minute play time!)

  More strangely, Blue Panther sells expansion sets of tiles and promotes Pulling Strings on the box with the tag line “A new board every time!” – even though the specific letters and their layout are irrelevant. Having different icons to label each string makes no difference to the playing of the game, a fact that will be clear to anyone who’s played but not beforehand when people might be considering whether to purchase those (superfluous) expansions at the same time as the game itself.

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