Pretzel Games | Men at Work | Family Game | Ages 8+ | 30-45 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

I expected to feel worse after watching a girder fall on a couple of injured employees, but there’s something disturbingly amusing about it too, knowing someone has to go in with the rescue hook and pry that corpse out from under the wreckage.

Instruction cards are two-sided, with one side showing the piece to be placed and the other showing special rules. When a hot man is lying in a narrow passageway, do you pluck him out with your fingertips, or drag him out with the hook and hope he doesn’t snag and cause further damage? You lose one of your safety certificates; if you lose your last safety certificate you are out of the game.I have a great time playing it with people my own age too, and after a couple of drinks peoples’ judgement and overconfidence come through, with hilarious and disastrous results. If you ever played something like Rhino Hero, or built a house of cards, and enjoy creating these teetering erections, you’re really going to like Men At Work.

This provides a whole load of extra angles for your girders and balancing becomes far more difficult on a sloping surface. After all, future generations will be able to look at the sky where their toppled skyscraper should have been. Players take on the role of construction workers, trying to safely build their piece of the structure.The game includes three gaming modules to add loads of replayability, as well as wooden components housed within a well-designed insert for easy set up. This is a really lovely dexterity game with beautiful wooden components, a great box with preformed insert, and lots of replayability. If the piece which succumbs to gravity’s irresistible pull hits the table, the player who caused it to happen loses one of their safety certificates.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The next player will then use the rescue hook to remove any debris from the site before continuing their turn. Designed by Rita Modl and produced by Pretzel Games, Men at Work will test your dexterity and have you building to dizzying heights. Think of classic games like tiddlywinks, marbles, Subbuteo, even throwing playing cards into a bowl.If you want to change things up, the cardboard crane can be built and placed in the middle of the starting construction. Men at Work fits the bill perfectly: easy to learn, cards that can be read and understood by my 6 year old and a level of difficulty that means nobody is immune to screwing up and bringing a fledgling building site crumbling. I played this game with a few different groups of people in different settings and everyone was doubled over in laughter by the third turn of the game.

Beams and girders fall off, workers plunge to their doom, even their cute little hard hats can get knocked off. This probably isn’t something you would guess about me, but I can be a bit snobbish about stacking games. Balance and dexterity games are becoming more and more common, but for us at TGR that s definitely not a bad thing. After all, Men at Work is a dexterity game, so the difficulty comes from placing the pieces on the construction site. It’s a simple deck of cards, split between draw and discard, with the back of the draw pile showing whether you’ll place a girder or a hot man — along with the color of the girder you’re being asked to place or the color of the girder your hot man will rest upon — and the front of the discard pile providing a twist of placement that must be observed.I've played my fair share of stacking games from the classic Jenga to the adorable ones like Animal Upon Animal and Cat Tower, but I have to say that Men at Work is one of the best dexterity based games I have played to date. The idea of stacking objects while maintaining their structural integrity isn’t the reason I play board games, but any time I play a game where I have resources or tokens in my supply, I find myself stacking them anyway, so why not put that skill to the test in a way I can laugh at and be laughed at right back? The surest footholds are usually closer to the table, while girders grow more skewampus with every inch of elevation, often in ways that aren’t immediately apparent because Men at Work doesn’t usually soar all that high. If you've not played a dexterity game, they are infuriatingly joyous and have you twitching with excitement and trepidation.