Game Review: Grimpe! / Climb!

By W. Eric Martin
October 3, 2008

Publisher: Le Scorpion Masqué
Designer: Benoit Michard
Players: 1-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes
Rules Language: French / English
Links:

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Six, with 2-4 players in each game

Thematic dexterity games are the platypuses of the game world: You’ve heard of them and perhaps read a few details about their behavior, but you’re unlikely to have experienced one in real life. Now’s your choice, though, thanks to Climb!, which recreates the climbing wall from the neighborhood gym as a digital challenge to be enjoyed in the comfort of your own home.

Climb! includes a deck of 42 cards, each of which has one to three color-coded holes in it. Each color matches a digit – black is for the thumb, blue the index finger, green the ring finger, and so on – and the cards come in three levels of difficulty, with the holes getting smaller with each jump in skill level. The holes represent the holds embedded in a climbing wall, and your challenge is to make your fingers climb the holes in the cards from base to summit. While most holes are a single color, some are half-and-half to show that either of two fingers can be placed inside them and a few are bordered by two colors simultaneously, which means that the indicated two fingers must both be placed inside the hole in order for the move to be legal.

Each move in the game is the transition of some number of fingers from one set of holes to another set, with a different finger staying in place from turn to turn to provide continuity to your climb. (Think Thing from The Addams Family or the itsy-bitsy spider doing its waterspout crawl.) The trick to climbing is that you score more points when you have more fingers touching the table simultaneously – 1, 3, 6 or 10 points for 2-5 fingers on the table – which therefore encourages you to take risks stretching your digits in ways that real climbers would shy away from.

If you place the wrong finger in the wrong spot, you fall and your turn ends, scoring you only the points that you had earned prior to your death; if you move one of the hole cards, you fall; if you repeat a position already used during that round, guess what? More falling. At the end of the round, after each player has had a go at the hill, you switch the cards adjacent to the base and summit and add one card near the peak. The game lasts three rounds, and whoever has scored the most points wins.

I have to give props to Benoit Michaud for cleverness because the design meshes challenging and fun game play with a real world theme that makes sense and sells the story of the game. Even if you’ve never climbed, you grok the game as soon as you put one digit in base camp and start to contemplate how to scale the cards. Understanding doesn’t entail success, mind you, because most people have never exercised their hands along these lines. (One player suggested that nurses use the game with patients undergoing physical rehabilitation.)

Having long and flexible digits is obviously a plus, but steadiness and preparation also play a role as you need to transition smoothly from one move to the next while not boxing yourself into an impossible situation. As such, experience gives you an edge over first-time climbers, but in most cases players aren’t focused on the game so much as the experience of playing. They get a kick out of the game’s uniqueness and just trying to survive on their way to the top.

That said, I don’t know how often I’ll play Climb! outside of using it to introduce newcomers to modern, original designer games. For all its cleverness, it’s not a game that I’ve felt like playing multiple times in one game session as with more traditional fillers such as R-Eco, Geschenkt or Zirkus Flohcati. Partly this is due to the sameness of the board from round to round; while two of the cards change and one new card is added to the layout, I often feel that I’m repeating routes in later rounds rather than exploring new land. The board is slightly longer from round to round, but there’s no escalation of tension or a sense of an increased payoff. Instead, the game is all about confounding expectations of what a game can be, and after a couple of gos – whether you’re lying as a broken, twisted heap at the bottom of the hill, or feeling like a less-active Hillary atop the summit – you’re ready for something else.

Note to Spiel 08 attendees: Climb! and Le Scorpion Masqué’s other game, J’te Gage Que... will be available at the Cocktail Games booth (9-21).

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