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Game Review: Stix & Stones
By W. Eric Martin
March 19, 2010
Designer: Steve Ryan
Publisher: Educational Insights
Players: 4+
Ages: 7+
Playing Time: 180 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $25
Links: 
Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Twice, once each with five and six players
Steve Ryan’s Stix & Stones from Educational Insights has all the hallmarks of a game designed for a mainstream audience as it’s a new take on a familiar game with a clever title that’s a well-known phrase. Here’s the pitch that retailers would give to potential buyers: ”Stix & Stones is like Pictionary, but instead of drawing you build images out of plastic sticks and stones that your teammates then try to identify.”
For the mainstream buyer, the phrase “like Pictionary but different” would get many of them to the cash register, but we serious gamers are made of sterner stuff. Sure, “like Pictionary but different” gives someone 75% of a good game – the game will promote creativity, be interactive and provide great moments – yet the final 25% of the game is the critical stuff. Does Stix & Stones have something like the arbitrary die roll in Pictionary that makes randomness as powerful as skill? Or does it fit the Cluzzle model of having cleverness in your artistry be of primary importance?
Before I answer those questions, check out these images from one of my games and take a guess as to what’s depicted:
These creations were half of the first six designs in the game, and no one guessed them correctly – neither the teammates of the picture builder, nor the players on the other team. Score after 30 minutes: 0 - 0.
An Invitation to Fail
The main problem with Stix & Stones is that it invites players to bid to failure. Unlike Pictionary, in which teams compete against the clock or against each other, Stix & Stones has the picture builders on the two teams bid against one another, Name That Tune-style, as to the number of pieces they will use in their artwork: “I can draw that item with only 15 pieces.” “I’ll do it in 13.” “Okay, 12.” And so on with each picture builder mentally shedding bits from an imagined design until the real-life creation will be as illusory as the imagined one and no one will guess anything.
Players can bid to failure because there’s little chance of a penalty for doing so. If your team guesses the object, you score one point; if your team fails and the opponents guess it, they score two points; however, if the opponents also guess incorrectly, no one scores anything. Thus, you might as well drop your bid lower and win the right to draw as your team will guess first – and if your team can’t guess it, then your opponents will likely fail, too.
Simple solution #1: Award one point to the opposing team whenever the team with the winning bid fails to correctly identify the artwork, and two points if the opposing team can guess the object. Teams would therefore constantly advance toward the ten point goal line and not hover at zero while they get drunker and even less adept at building pictures.
Time to Guess?
Stix & Stones also fails to measure up against Pictionary in terms of how players take guesses. In Pictionary players guess the entire time that a drawer is drawing because either time is running out or another team might beat you to the punch. As the drawer, you get to respond to your teammates’ stupid guesses by taking a new approach or editing the work that you’ve already done. Surely those bozos will get it now, right?
In Stix & Stones your teammates are forbidden from guessing while you construct the piece in 60 seconds, then they caucus and can make only a single guess. One! Which means there’s lots of humming and hawing while they debate whether the square with a dollar sign in it is a bank or a vault or money or a bill or something else entirely. Time passes, and everyone gets bored, and there’s no real reason for choosing one answer over another, so you start picking apart every little detail of the artwork even though they don’t matter, and everyone gets even boreder, if that’s possible, then finally someone says, “Oh, whatever, we’ll go with your answer,” then you’re wrong, then the other team does the same thing, and oh, God, when will it end?
Simple solution #2: Allow players to guess while their teammate is creating the artwork or provide a limited amount of time in which players can guess as many times as they want. I mean, I would have been bummed out after I made this fantastic work…
...and we had failed to gain a point because my teammates guessed “aardvark” instead of “anteater.” Thankfully, they intuited that the stones were ants, not termites. (The rules allow you to score when naming synonyms, but aardvarks and anteaters are not the same, despite their superficial bug-eating ways.)
Meeeeee!!!
What’s the most fun part of Pictionary? Guessing what someone else is drawing? Not really, although it does have moments when the drawer is growing exasperated by your denseness and jabbing at the paper again and again and circling the same thing repeatedly as if the sheer quantity of circles will transmit information to your brain. Knowing what the drawer on the other team is doing and quietly laughing at her feeble attempt? This can be good for a few chuckles, yes, especially when you think about how awesome your drawing would have been.
Which just points out that the most fun part of Pictionary is actually creating the pictures – that is, having an idea for how you can dash off lines to create a globe before the other team’s drawer can. When you have a good partner, you as the artist can feel your minds merging, and your heart fills with smugness and joy when she correctly guesses “accordion” while everyone else at the table sees only a half-dozen chicken scratches and the sandtimer is not even a quarter empty.
Creating a picture is also the fun part of Stix & Stones, but the game lacks an “all play” feature in which both builders create a picture at once. You can still have the vicarious thrill of looking at an opponent’s “artistry” and knowing that you can do better, but what’s more likely to happen is that you’ll lower your bid so that you can be active and do something, rather than sitting and watching until you’re next chance to bid, which once again leads to everlasting failure and a neverending game.
Simple solution #3: Add an “all play” feature to Stix & Stones. Perhaps you can change the scoring system so that each picture builder can use as many bits as she wants, but if a team guesses the right answer while using fewer components than the other team, they score more points.
Or players can have bid cards that show an upper limit in the number of pieces they’ll use, along with a point value they’ll score if their team guesses the right answer first. Using more pieces results in fewer points. By taking this approach, the game would then feature a bluffing element of sorts in terms of how players want to approach their bids. Do I bid low and hope my teammates can get Christopher Columbus from only seven bits, or take a safer route? Maybe the picture builders now also have to compete for the building components rather than being able to take the ones they want.
I can think of many different approaches to the 25% of Stix & Stones that isn’t Pictionary, and while those approaches might not be better than what’s in the box – given that I’ve playtested none of them – the game as published drags on far too long for the amount of fun we had, leading us to stop both times before we put in the 180 minutes required to reach ten points. Thus we come to…
Simple solution #4: Put Stix & Stones aside and play Pictionary instead.
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 19, 2010 at 04:00 AM in Game Reviews, In-Depth / 332
