Play Impressions: Cornerstone

June 21, 2009 4 comments

Cornerstone by Good company Games is a sort of reverse-Jenga. Rather than taking pieces out of a tower and hoping it doesn’t fall down, you’re constructing the tower and hoping it doesn’t fall down. Each player gets an assortment of blocks, made up of a number wooden cubes. The smallest pieces are 1 cube, the largest made of 6 cubes. On each turn, the player rolls 2d6 to determine what type of blocks they can use; if a 4 and a 6 is rolled, for example, the player can pick a block made of 4 cubes, or a block made of 6 cubes. Roll doubles, and the player can use any piece he chooses. If you run out of pieces of the size you roll, you have to forfeit another piece of your choosing. To make this a little more complicated, each player has a climber. You can move your climber up the tower like steps, as many moves as you’re able. To win, you need to have the highest climber when all pieces have been used or the tower falls down, whichever comes first.

When I played this at Ides of Gaming it quickly became more challenging than it looks. The cubes are arranged in a checkboard pattern, alternating between plain wood and each player’s color. Your climber can move on the plain wood or your color, but not on the other players’ colors. The players are building on each others’ construction to get their climber higher, but can also block each other and even get other climbers trapped. A player can ‘take a mulligan’ and start over at the base, but depending upon how the tower is constructed it may not be possible to get back up. To add to the challenge, the blocks are pretty roughly constructed and a bit uneven, so the towers aren’t particularly stable, This is actually a selling point; it would be a lot easier, far less nerve-wracking and not nearly as much fun if the pieces were all smooth and uniform like Jenga blocks. To make it even more challenging, we were playing on the opposite end of a large table that was also hosting a game of Pandemic, increasing the likelihood that the table would be bumped. We eventually attracted a crowd, who gathered around to see who would make it fall. To everyone’s disappointment and our own amazement none of the players knocked it down, and the game ended when we ran out of pieces.

Below the jump are some short videos of the game being played, including some humorous and particularly stressful moments.

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