Intro/First Impressions

You know when you pick up a certain present on Christmas morning and just know that it is going to be a board game?! You get all excited, but kind of nervous that it might be one you already have. Ya, that was me this past year with Dimension. Though it was coming from Kaitlyn, and she has good taste so I wasn’t too concerned.

After opening it, I was a little shocked. What is this game? I’ve never heard of it before? A lot of times that means that it doesn’t bode well for a game – as the best games get talked about a lot and end up in most people’s collections. Though, this game came highly recommended by the staff at the board game shop so that had me excited.

What I did notice right away from the packaging is that it was supposed to be a fast-paced puzzle game, which you have to stack small little wooden (?) balls. SOUNDS AWESOME!! Let’s get into the details of the review of Dimension board game…

Thoughts

To get right to the point, this game is really fun! It is, as stated, very fast paced and can really make your brain work, in a good way.

The game is very easy to set up and get going on. The rules are relatively short and easy to understand. We will likely do a quick How To Play Dimension Simplified version to get you started even quicker. There is a small game board and set of balls for anywhere from 1-4 players, a stack of rule cards, a timer, and some point tokens. That’s it. Simple.

If you are unfamiliar, to play the game, you will lay out a set of rule cards face up (see picture below), and then flip the timer. Each player must build a pyramid with the different colored balls that in accordance with the rule cards. As mentioned, this must be done within 1 minute!

The game suggests using 6 rule cards to start, but says that you can add more/less if you want to change the difficulty of the game. This is done over 6 rounds with the winner being the person who accumulated the most points.

I like that each round in this game is super short. With the implementation of the timer, you are forced to really focus on your tower and build as fast as you can. With this short time frame, it can keep the attention of even your shortest attention span friends…cough…Tito….cough.

With the game being only 6 rounds long, it is over before you know it, and usually everyone wants to play again. The beauty of this set up is that if you know you want to play this game for a while you can say from the start that you want to do 10 (or however many) rounds.

Our group found that 6 rounds was almost too short for us. We found it very easy to keep track of who was winning, which takes a bit of the fun out of the game. If you add more rounds, you can easily lose track. In fact, one of the cons of this game is that there are a lot of even scored rounds. We found that after a round that was fairly easy, everyone ended up with the same amount of points, which happens more often than you would think. A quick house rule that we implemented was the extra bonus token awarded to the first one done. If you got all the tasks/rules done correctly, and were the first one to shout “DONE”, you would get a bonus token. This added to the stress and awesomeness of the game.

Bonus tokens are usually the deciding factor in this game. They can range from -6 to +6 point value depending on how many you collect. To understand bonus tokens, see our How to Play Dimension guide.

I love the quick thinking little puzzles that you must go through each round. They aren’t mentally exhausting in that you have to sit and contemplate them, but exhausting in that you are in a go-go-go mentality for a quick minute. In some rounds your brain can figure it out super quick, yet in others you are scrambling to get the last ball in place.

In certain scenarios, you will be faced with some critical decision making. This can come in a couple forms. One form is when you have to decide whether placing that last ball on top to get an extra point (and possibly a bonus token) or leaving it off because it makes you lose 2 points by breaking a rule. The other form is when you have 2 contradicting rules. You may be faced with something like ‘blue cannot touch orange’ and ‘blue has to touch orange’. You must decide which rule you will need to break in order to get the most points… or maybe you will decide to not put any of one color on the board so that you will get the points but forego the bonus token.

One of the other nice things about the versatility of this board game is the ability to add/remove rules as mentioned earlier. If you are playing with a newbie, or say a younger person, you can take away a couple rules to make it easier for them. You can add more throughout the game if you like, as it doesn’t change the fundamentals of the game, but only the amount of points available. Plus, it is even for everyone playing so there shouldn’t be an issue.
Another tiny gripe I have with the game is that there are a tonne of 50 point tokens. 24 of them to be exact. It is usually only at the end of the game, when you are changing up your point tokens, that you use the 50 point tokens… and usually only one per person. It would be nicer to have more of the lower point tokens so they are easier to find. That said, however, as we play this game more, I can see us playing more and more rounds, so we might need those higher point value tokens more.

This game cannot be adapt to play with more than 4 players like some board games, since you would need another individual board and another set of balls. So, if that is what you were hoping to do, this isn’t the game for you. However, this game can be played solo, so it has that going for it. You can challenge yourself to see how many points you can get. Again, you can increase or decrease some of the variables mentioned earlier in order to challenge yourself.

Conclusion

Overall, I think this is a fantastic game. It has a lot of the things that I look for in a game. It has quick thinking, decision making, quick to set up, and quick to learn. It isn’t a huge strategy/thinker game where you need to outfit your opponents, but you still use your brain to try to think quicker than the others, so it’s not all individual. You won’t get a lot of interaction with other players during game play, but I found that we did a lot of discussing after the fact.

We have tried this one out with a few different groups and has been a hit with pretty much everyone. We use it as a good starter game for the night. It gets everyone full of energy and gets your brain into the right space for a night of board games. This one has been a good add to our collection, and think it would add some good variety into yours as well!