HABA Remains King of Stacking Games with Flotsam Float
HABA has a long history of wonderful family stacking games. Animal Upon Animal and Rhino Hero are two of the best known dexterity games for children, and they’ve released several variations of both as well - including the wonderful My Very First Games variants for toddlers. But it’s been a while since we’ve gotten a brand new stacking title to get excited about.
Flotsam Float is one of HABA’s newest family games, and, to be perfectly honest, I really didn’t know what to expect about a game named after ocean trash. Perhaps we were in store for a nice environmental lesson. But we came into this game with a completely blank slate - we didn’t even know it was a dexterity before we set it up for the first time. And my first clue that we were in for some stacking was the bags of wooden pieces of various shapes and sizes.
And once I realized it was a balancing game, my next question was, of course, how is this game going to differentiate itself from its stacking peers. Because it would have to have its own unique identify for us to choose it over our other favorite balancing games in the future. And, trust me folks, differentiate itself it did! In fact, we enjoyed it so much we’re making it our Game of the Month for October 2022.
Disclosure: Flotsam Float was shared with us by the publisher, with no expectation of becoming Game of the Month. All thoughts and opinions are our own.
So let me start by saying that Flotsam Float has a very unique twist on the balancing game formula that is completely new to us, and leads to a very exciting family battle. Not only do you have to balance the various wooden flotsam pieces, but you actually have to pick up the entire tower and transfer the whole thing to a new location on every turn!
You might think this sounds incredibly difficult, and it can be - especially depending on how good the players are at stacking. But you’d be wrong in thinking that younger children are at an automatic disadvantage. My 6-year-old is much better at this game than I am. In our family playthroughs, it turns out my shaky hands are the worst at this game - meaning we’ve added yet another board game to our collection that everyone will consistently destroy me in!
How to Play Flotsam Float
Setup consists of several little mountains, and atop one mountain is a raft. Each mountain is surrounded by 4 cards that form a beach around the mountain, and upon each card is a random wooden piece of flotsam. On your turn, you simply select one piece of flotsam, and balance it on the raft. It doesn’t necessarily need to be on top of another piece of flotsam, but of course this becomes increasingly difficult as more flotsam is added to the raft and you have to start going up.
Then you flip over the card where the flotsam was lying, and see which mountain you are required to move the raft to. You must then pick up the entire raft with the flotsam stack on top, and transfer it to the other mountain without spilling anything. You can use two hands to do this, and you can stand up and move around the table as much as you need.
If you successfully transfer the raft, you get to keep the card, and add the shells on it to your total points. There are also ways to earn bonus cards if you stack your flotsam high. But if you drop any flotsam on your transfer, you don’t earn your card. You have to put the card back with one piece of flotsam on it, and give any other flotsam that fell to a sea turtle that’s collecting the extras.
At the end of the game you simply count the shells on all the cards you have earned, and the player with the most shells is the winner. It’s an elegantly simple game that’s easy for kids to understand, but still has an incredibly entertaining element of difficulty and skill to it.
Family Thoughts on Flotsam Float
As I mentioned before, my 6-year-old does better at this game than I do. And, honestly, any competitive board game where this is a possibility is a big winner for us. The age recommendation on the box is 6+, and I’d agree with that decision. Younger kids could certainly play the game, but their lack of dexterity might eventually make it a competitive advantage for the older players.
A caveat to that might be if you choose to simply play the game cooperatively. You could easily play Flotsam Float with younger kids with very little rules or structure. We’ve often played Animal Upon Animal this way in the past, just seeing how long we could go and how high we could make the stack. And Flotsam Float would work well with that frame of mind.
The official rules include a way for making the game more difficult, but not for a cooperative variant. If you choose to play cooperatively, you could easily track how well you do by counting how many pieces of flotsam the turtle has collected at the end of the game. Together you can go for your family record of the lowest amount of flotsam collected by the sea turtle.
But, honestly, playing Flotsam Float competitively works really smoothly with us. We can even play it competitively without worrying about counting up who wins at the end. And when the kids don’t care about who won the game, I think that speaks pretty highly of how fun the gameplay itself actually is.
Do you like playing dexterity and balance games? Which one is your family favorite? Let us know in the comments!
