Review: Wacky Blasters
Publisher: Golden
Year: 1990
Tagline: The Game That Will Blow You Away!
how we met
Oh, it was a fine day. This was also up there in terms of how embarrassed I was in a single purchase. You see, I live near a small town that I do not visit often and when I do, I visit its only thrift shop even less frequently. The first time I decided to peruse their board game section it was a treasure trove! I think I bought six or eight games that day, and Wacky Blasters was among them. It was huge and old and weird and $3.
how it plays
The Wacky Blasters box has a handy illustration explaining gameplay.
Any questions?
Really the only thing to add here is that the game comes with a die that you roll. If you roll one through five that indicates how many times you can squeeze your Wacky Blaster with the ultimate goal of moving your puffball upward and onward to Puffball Peak. If you roll the Wacky Blaster icon (for us a six because the game was missing the die) then you can use one squeeze to send an opponent backward.
That’s pretty much it. If your puffball leaves the board then you start over at Puffball Patch, the start of play. The board contains several pitfalls and traps for your puffball. You can take any shortcuts you want. Just puff. Always be puffing. Puff forever!
A close up to show some of the traps on your path, some of them suspiciously puffball shaped
how it went
The game comes with three puffballs for each color, and for the first ten minutes or so I wondered why we each get three puffballs when really only one is in play. That answer became clear pretty quickly, much more quickly than the ten minutes it took for me to catch on. Practice! Squeezing your Wacky Blaster seems simple enough, but it’s hard to gain traction. And if your friends are mean like mine are, they will laugh at you.
Meet Schnoz, Corky, Squeaky and Wheezer (from left to right)
A strategy I recommend is squeezing at the top of head and feet. Look at that puffball fly!
I really enjoy the idea of this game. I like the limitations of using a die and that there is a learning curve. But none of us mastered Wacky Blasters. We all restarted on multiple occasions, and it was a big plus if we were able to move the puffball at all.
The whole board
We played for probably half an hour and we had a couple of close calls near Puffball Peak, but it felt more like we were in a timeless loop of highs and lows. Maybe like a kiddie coaster that you can’t get off of. Finally we decided on a free-for-all, elbowing each other out of the way to just. get. that. puffball. to. the. peak.
So yeah, we all lost.
play or pass
Pass. Wacky Blasters looks so fun and just ridiculous enough to be amazing.
It’s so pretty and bizarre
But in the end, it was painful. Just to drive this point home, I’ll give you more context. We played this on a game night that Bill lovingly called Baby Game Night, hoping that by playing some of our more children-targeted games in one evening we can in turn rid our basement of some of the larger game boxes. Wacky Blasters is not the worst game we played that night, but it was not the best and it was the only one we decided not to finish. That was the lowest bar we have at our disposal, I assure you. Shame on you, Wacky Blasters.