10 of the best marble-based family board games
Having a ball on the tabletop with the likes of Klask and Magic Mountain
So shiny! So spherical!
If you’ve managed to get through life with the majority of your marbles well and truly kept, then several tabletop games put them to good, effective use.
Want to keep the whole family entertained? Then keep on rolling with the all-ages games listed below.
Rock Me Archimedes
Named after the bloke who literally wrote the book on levers, Rock Me Archimedes is a game of dexterity and critical thinking.
A balancing act in every sense, two players take turns in attempting to move four of their marbles to their designated end zone for victory.
Plot twist: the gamer who sends the platform for a nasty bump on the tabletop is automatically disqualified, meaning that players must be mindful of the overall picture to ensure a decent enough equilibrium to playing conditions.
One potential downside of Matt Buchanan’s wooden game is that it uses a die, adding an element of luck that feels out of place for something that feels so strategic. The inclusion makes for a great family game, but if it’s your wits that you truly want tested, then brainboxes should have the mental agility to house-rule the D6 out of the game.
Ker-Plunk
Enduring games are, sometimes, enduring for a reason.
Sure, a 73-page rule book can (but not always) lead to good times, but when a game’s object can be condensed down to ‘stopping these marbles from dropping’ then it opens the gateway to everyone.
Hence why Eddie Goldfarb, Damon Saddler and René Soriano’s creation, Ker-Plunk, stays in print to this day, ever since its 1967 release when the Ideal Toy Company picked up its sticks and launched this dexterity game of patience, precision and judgement.
While the tube’s design may have gone through changes over the decades – for better and for worse (Hasbro’s helter-skelter-style dispensing slide definitely falls under the latter category for the time-wasting it can cause during assembly) – and the plastic components have felt less fantastic as the impact of the climate crisis becomes increasingly felt, that gut-wrenching feeling of that sound of marbles hitting rock bottom remains hard to replicate.
Stay Alive
Sometimes, however, the classics don’t stick about but get put out in the publisher’s back yard to rust.
As is the way with the Milton Bradley game intuitive Stay Alive. From all the way back in 1965, Gordon A Barlow’s design was a notable battle of board-based survival for a generation or two, with players taking it in turns to slide marbles back and forth on a four-sided grid, hopefully to cause their opponent’s pieces to literally drop out of the game without doing their own side any mischief.
Never fear if the game is no longer commercially available – its ubiquity in the family homes of the 1970s and 80s means that there are plenty of copies available on eBay and it’s therefore possible to save a big block of plastic from heading to the landfill site for a fairly cheap price.
Pitch & Plakks
Sometimes a game can come up smelling of roses having landed itself squarely in the fertiliser.
Spanish duo Jordi Dominguez Tholen and Haritz Mugica Sanchez initially drew some criticism from some backers when Pitch & Plakks gained its initial Kickstarter release in 2021. Much of the components were wooden but the product wasn’t the 100% plastic-free promised finished article that it had been pitched as, and not all the balls that came with the game were, let’s just say, as globular as they could have been.
BUT… that being said, the pair had the foundations of a great game: an easily adaptable, multi-combination tabletop flickable mini-golf game, that’s too darn playable – enough (just) to overlook what would usually be unforgivable errors.
Savvy gamers could also see the wonkier, eggier balls as a bit of a plus, using them for different trick shots like different types of golf club to get by obstacles such as tunnels and volcanoes.
Super Mario Maze Game DX Deluxe
Originating in Japan, Epoch Games have imported several Super Mario-themed marble track games over the years. Chief among them is this joystick-controlled 3D tilt maze shenanigan.
Notionally set in the depths of Bowser’s Castle, the world’s most instantly recognisable fictional Italian plumber (represented by a marble on this occasion) must set about rescuing Princess Peach – yes, again – from the clutches of the turtle terror.
Fun in solo play, gamers can also time themselves against rivals to achieve their rescue the fastest, navigating their spherical star through seven separate sections, three storeys and a promised 120,000 maze combinations.
But, for parents with younger children, it’s a solo game that turns into a decent co-operative, with turn-taking enabling a useful prop for some hand-eye co-ordination lessons.
Potion Explosion
“I’m in the middle of a chain reaction,” sung Diana Ross in her triumphant Bee Gees-backed 1986 No.1.
A school lesson-based potion-themed board game might not exactly have been the inspiration for such lyrical content matter, but that doesn’t mean to say that Potion Explosion can’t give its players some after-midnight action on a similar sounding theme either.
In Stefano Castelli, Andrea Crespi and Lorenzo Silva’s 2015 gateway game, marbles are randomly loaded up into a cardboard dispenser and players take turns in picking out spheres to add to their chemical creations.
If marbles of the same colour in the dispenser touch each other, then Ross’s titular Chain Reaction is initiated, allowing gamers to subsequently add those to their supply too for additional points – though hopefully without the Supremes star’s desired “instant radiation” added to the mix.
Unlike Ross’s own enthusiastic chart-topping-inspiring playing partner, whether you also get a medal when you’re lost in action is entirely up to you and your own gaming group.
Dr Eureka
Why marbles provide such a base for scientific-based board games is a mystery, but Roberto Fraga’s Dr Eureka follows Potion Explosion’s trend. This time, vials form the basis of dexterity–strategy family-friendly gameplay in Blue Orange’s 2016 release.
More dynamic than Potion Explosion, Dr Eureka sees players compete to be the first to line up their marbles in the same pattern as that printed on one of 54 challenge cards. Participants must not touch the marbles as they attempt to transfer them from test tube to test tube.
Designer Roberto Fraga’s short-and-sweet diversion may not be to hardened gamers’ tastes, but it will provide a high-energy 15-minute diversion on a game day with family.
Magic Mountain
Winner of the 2022 Kinderspiel award, Magic Mountain – or Zauberberg in its native Germany – is a roll-and-race game. Players attempt to hit witchy counters from their own team with a marble to send them further down the tilting board to qualify for sorcery school and thus be declared the winner.
There’s a lot of luck involved in this simple title from Jens-Peter Schliemann and Bernhard Weber, but there are dexterity, and decision-making elements in the mix, too.
What’s more, rules lay out both collaborative and competitive formats, ensuring that this’ll be a decent way to spend some family time together, whichever rules your crew prefer.
Klask
Who needs marbles when one will do? Klask provides an instant, easy-to-set-up gaming hit, suitable for homes and bars.
Think of this as a miniaturised, magnetised, wooden, non-electronic version of air hockey, complete with additional means of scoring, and you won’t go far wrong in imagining its appeal.
Danish carpenter Mikkel Bertelsen’s creation has seen its popularity grow to the extent that it now has both two- and four-player versions to its name, as well as official tournaments held in 16 countries.
And, while it’s great for playing in pubs, it’s a great beginner dexterity game to play with the kids, too – so long as you don’t mind the horrible scraping sound your playing piece makes as it screeches over the board. Maybe even Baby Shark is a preferable soundtrack to that.
Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar
Can a game have too many marbles? Anyone who has played FI:TCOV-K, as it may pithily be known, with all its expansions may agree with that sentiment – weeping pathetically as they reset cardboard jewel tokens and hordes of green, gold and orange spheres spewn forth by an anthropomorphised, angry volcano from a left-side of the board that has perhaps been rather too overloaded with excitement.
But if you can get past the recovery and recuperation time, nothing beats Restoration Games’ remake, and improvement, of the 1980s’ Milton Bradley family-friendly roll-and-move 3D board classic.
Throw in jumping tigers, rubber boulders and a pirate-shipwreck island-off-an-island, and acolytes of chaos will have their ideal board game.
If only the retro-fuelled publishers could add in that final front-end peninsula expansion that Fireball fans have anticipated for years…
Got a favourite marble-based board game that we haven’t featured? Leave your suggestions in the comments.
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