When we reviewed the original My Shelfie on Board's Eye View we described it as Ikea Kallax -The Board Game. The original My Shelfie was a tile drafting game from Cranio Creations and Lucky Duck where players are racing to populate their shelving units. Now
My Shelfie is back. You're again racing to fill your shelves with the requisite books, games, plants, trophies and cats but Simone Luciani has transitioned the game into a light easy-to-play roll & write. Sara Valentino's art gives this new game recognisable continuity with the original.
In place of tile drafting, the 2-4 players each turn roll the six custom six-sided dice. These obviously show the five shelf categories but the sixth face is wild: you can't use it on its own to represent any of the other symbols but you can add it to any of the other symbols rolled. The 3D stand-up shelving units were the standout feature of My Shelfie, and inevitably they don't make the cut in this dice game version. Instead, the game comes with four dry-wipe boards that show your shelving unit as a 5 x 5 grid. Tho' these lack the immediate appeal of the upright units of the original game, they function well with the supplied dry-wipe pens as players mark off the selections from their die rolls.
The roll & write game is a race to complete rows and columns on your grid, and there's a 'take that' element too because when a player completes a row or column (ie: has circled off all five items), the other players must eliminate (mark with a cross) all the items in that row or column that they haven't circled: at the end of the game you'll only score for those rows and columns where you have at least three circled items. Aggressive players may try to focus on completing a row or column to knock out opponents' scoring opportunities but other players may prefer to spread their choices so that they have at least three items marked off in as many rows and columns as possible, so guaranteeing those rows and columns score...
Playing in around 15-20 minutes, My Shelfie: The Dice Game is an easily accessible roll & write that's very much at the lighter end of what is now a wide complexity spectrum of roll & write games. Players only need a brief explanation of the end-game scoring and they can be up & rolling straight out of the box.