In the Shelf game , we have a clear task – to place items on the title piece of furniture. However, before we do that, we need to assemble the shelves. It only takes a moment, and the finished structures look nice and are well made. In addition to these, the box includes Secret and Common Objective cards, the game board, bases, score and game end tokens, the first player marker, and a bag into which all item tiles are placed.
Preparation is also quick and easy. Everyone takes a bookshelf, draws a random Secret Objective card, and places it on its base so that it cannot be seen by others. Place the board in the middle of the table and place the chips on it, which you take out of the bag. They must be placed on the spaces, and their number depends on the number of players. Two random common objective cards are laid out next to the board and point tokens are placed on them, and the game end tile is placed on the board in the designated place.
On your turn, you may take one, two, or three item tiles. They must lie in a straight line and be adjacent to each other horizontally or vertically, and each must not touch any other tile before drawing. Then we throw the selected items from above on our shelf. The order is up to us, but all tiles collected during one turn must go to the same column.
If there are 4 items or less on the board, put them back in the bag and then place the tiles back on the board as in setup.
We play this way until someone fills their entire shelf. Then we play the round until the end, so that everyone has the same number of turns and add up the points. We get them by completing secret and common goals and for groups of adjacent items of the same color.
Shelf is a solidly made family game that looks good on the table. The rules are very simple, and the whole fun is to try to reconcile several different patterns that should be on our shelf. Common goals most often indicate a shape or a line composed of the same or different colors of tiles, but do not indicate which ones. Secret cards show individual places on the shelf where we should put the indicated color. In addition, we also try to create as many groups of tiles of the same type as possible. The requirements may be mutually exclusive or we may simply run out of space for all the patterns we need to arrange. Therefore, sometimes we will have to choose a higher scoring setting and let go of some requirements.
The game will most often hit the tables of less advanced people, families with children or as a warm-up before larger titles. Arranging items on the shelf is pleasant and easy, but at the same time requires rethinking our movements and planning.
You can also have fun guessing the titles of the board games that are on the yellow item tokens. Nothing prevents you from playing a minigame during a normal game of Shelf .
