Game review 87: Wacky Blasters
Squeeze the life out of your ill-fated gonzo character around a bizarre 3D obstacle course in this dexterity tabletop game
Britain is a weird place to live.
Our winters are cold, but not the nice kind of cold with snow to stomp in and hills to get sleighing on. Instead it’s flat, damp and muddy, meaning any journey out will invariably result in sodden feet, fuelling a warm, comforting blanket of depression for six months in the year.
Our summers? Well, they’re not exactly embracingly hot. But they are stuffily humid. Add to that that everyone involved in building infrastructure in this nation has seemingly never heard of air conditioning and you’ve got a situation where no one can sleep peacefully as they stick to their linen with sweat for the remaining half of the year.
As a result, we appear to have gone rather weird as a nation. Unlike the French – who take to the streets at the first sign of anyone attempting to lift the pension age by a year, presumably because they get a good night’s sleep in the summer and hop across to the Alps for some snowy ski time in the colder months – we’re too groggy to do anything but tut, loudly, when our leaders insist on carrying out various tawdry scientific experiments on its lab-rat general public.
Can we steal all your resources without you noticing? Fill your rivers with crap without you instigating a full-on violent revolution? Shrink all their food packets down by a gram or two over time over several years but keep the prices going up, gaslighting you into thinking you’re an impoverished giant when you buy and hold a Twix?
To distract us from this state of affairs, we’ve created a series of sporting events in an effort to pretend that this is a fun, quirky place to live.
Of course, there’s the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling event where hundreds of competitors chuck themselves down a 180m, 1:2 gradient slope behind a wheel of double Gloucester moving at 80mph. But we’ve also got the people of Yorkshire carrying 7st sacks of coal along a long-distance circuit, while the residents of Llanwrtyd Wells in Wales avoid staring into the existential void of despair for too long with a spot of bog snorkelling, in which competitors must swim down a muddy trench, disqualification occurring to those who stick their head up out of the sludge for even a second.
‘It all sounds simple and quaint, but this is a frustrating experience, which gives rise to nefarious tactics’
I mention all this because after studying the game board for Wacky Blasters, it’s difficult to comprehend what’s in it for its four competitors – Squeaky, Corky, Schnoz and Wheezer, for that is their names – whose chosen sport is to be picked up by giant hands, have their heads squeezed as flat East Anglia’s countryside, and forced to snort a puffball up a mountain obstacle course using only the power of their engorged schnozzes.
One can only presume they’re doing so to avoid thinking about having to help a vulture capitalist pay off the mortgage on their 33-property portfolio via their escalating rent bill (currently standing at £1,500PCM), on their one-room ‘boutique’ apartment, lovingly covered in black mould, whose kitchen is a microwave.
But to Wacky Blasters. There’s an instant toy appeal to this dexterity game. The characters are four gonzo creatures with cross-eyed elephant-esque heads and Dookie-era Green Day hair, wearing what appears to be huge Shaquille O’Neil-sized basketball trainers in place of a functioning body. Without the use of arms or lower-body flexibility, the Blasters can only manoeuvre objects with their snouts, an element from which the game play arises over the 3D racetrack plastic-mould board.
Players must pick up their Blaster piece and give them a squeeze, whether they like it or not, using their ‘breath’ to hurtle a tiny pom-pom ball around various stumbling blocks posing a range of difficulty levels.
There’s at least two game modes to choose from: either a dice-rolling turn-based strategic option, which can see players lining up their shots like a golf pro on a putting green (usually with comedically appalling results), and provides the opportunity of sending your opponents back down the course rather than improving your own lot out of sheer spite (a bit like Brexit), or a frenzied, chaotic free-for-all, where all players compete at once.
It all sounds simple and quaint, but this is a frustrating experience, which gives rise to nefarious tactics. While it’s possible to use the obstacles to your own advantage – and making a shot that goes up the walls to take a huge stride in a single go is immensely satisfying when it happens – the Blasters’ breath power is, at best, unpredictable. This often results in the puff ball pathetically moving a millimetre and other times plunging off the board and therefore going back to the start, without really knowing how your attempt differed so much from the last.
When playing with E, after one such irritating go, it’s not uncommon to find my ball ‘accidentally’ being swiped back a few paces, or for the ball to be flicked with the Blaster’s trunk with an ‘oops’ and a semi-guilty expression.
As such, Wacky Blasters is perhaps one for the rule breakers rather than the sticklers. Finding things frustrating and unfair? Then rise up and make up your own rules to live by. Ah, probably not best for the British, after all.
Game facts and stats
Age
6+
Year first published
1990
Publisher
Golden
Designer
Peggy Brown
Player count
2–4
E’s review
What do you like best about the game?
“I love that we can blow it and we have to squirt the pom-pom.”
Is it tricky?
“A tiny bit on the bumpy bits. So be careful of that.”
20/10
My review
Set-up time
A matter of seconds
Cost
It’s a vintage game that went on limited release, with a fragile 3D board. As such it’s rare. And expensive. Sold items, with shipping, on eBay have gone for about £100 recently.
Practicality
This is a big box, even by vintage standards, and because of the 3D board, is a big old square, so storage poses its own issues. Inside the box, there aren’t many components, but those puff balls could be easily lost if you don’t ensure you pack everything away properly.
Fun for parents?
It is a lot of fun. But if your the kind of parent that wants your kids to play by the rules, that fun may go out the window swiftly. Prepare to go with the flow.
