Coming soon to Kickstarter, Floating Floors is a 2-4 player tactical dexterity game where you are moving your ninja meeple across a board to collect tokens ahed of your rival(s).
The modular board is created from tiles: 2 x 3 (two players) or 3 x3 (3 or 4 players). These have land and water squares. Your ninja tho' is moving across the eponymous floating floor tiles that will be balanced, sometimes precariously, atop the initial grid. On your turn, you'll usually roll three custom six-sided die that show black or white shapes on each face. These shapes represent the jutsu: the wooden shapes you collect, corresponding to whatever you rolled. You'll mostly be picking these up from the supply but you can take them from jutsu that have already been played - perhaps because there are no more in the supply or perhaps because you want to make an opponent's floor less stable...
The jutsu can be placed on any land squares but not on water, and you'll need your floating floor to be stable enough that it doesn't tip over when your ninja steps on it; hence the dexterity element of the game. Your ninja only moves orthogonally and only on squares of the matching colour (white on white; black on black) but you can also place a jutsu of your colour on an opposing colour square in order to be able to step on it: so, for example, putting a white jutsu on a black square means the white ninja can move onto that square (or, at least, onto that jutsu - the meeple has to be placed on top.
You're trying to collect your matched set of tokens (and, when you play with the advanced rules, you'll need to collect them in the right order - adding a memory element to the game). This means you'll need to plan ahead as well as having a steady hand because whenever you collect a token, the floor you were on has to be rotated 90 degrees...
In our initial plays of Floating Floors, we could see the importance of the different colours of the jutsu but not the reason for the different shapes. We found, however, that a wedge-shaped jutsu placed point up could be used to make life a bit harder for an opponent...
In the main, Takashi Sawada's Floating Floors works as a dexterity puzzle game where players are seeking to optimise their actions. You're penalised for tipping a floor over, so there's a strong push-your-luck element as you have to weigh up whether to maximise support for a floor or take a chance that your meeple won't tip it over. It's a tactical tussle as a two-player head to head but the Board's Eye View team especially enjoyed the slightly chaotic mayhem and extra interaction when playing with four.
Guf Studios are planning to bring Floating Floors to Kickstarter on 8 February. We'll post a link to the campaign when it goes live.