Shelfie Stacker Review

Shelfie Stacker hits close to home. It's all about reorganizing your shelves after you buy new games. Good problems, I guess? The game itself is a pretty straightforward dice placement game. Each round, players will put down a card from their hand of 8. Whoever has the lowest card gets first dibs at the boxes of dice, err games. Each box has 3 dice on it and whenever you take one, you'll place them all on your shelf. The kicker is that the shelf must go from low to high. If you can't put one on the shelf, it goes to your shelf of shame, a smaller one that loses you points at the end of the game for each die placed on it. Those cards you played earlier also have special abilities. You also don't need to use their abilities right away so you can make big combos by reserving your cards for later on. These cards can change values or allow you to remove ones from your shelves completely. The game goes on for 7 rounds and the player who has the best shelf wins.

The Good: This is a really light game that is very clearly targeted at board game hoarders like myself. I love all of the little easter eggs of other game titles. I spent a while just looking at the box itself figuring out all of the games. It's almost hard to believe that Shem Phillips designed this but it makes sense because it's very clean in how it plays. Not being forced to play card abilities right away makes for some really big turns later on in the game.

The Okay: You guessed it, dice = random. For the most part, you don't need to go in a sequential order, you just need to be in ascending and the modification of dice is probably some of the best I've seen. Your card abilities can change dice and sixes are wild by default so they can be any value but early on in the game when you don't have as many options available to you or if there are no sixes it can be tough to concede putting a higher value at the bottom.

The Not So Good: Honestly, there isn't anything I outright didn't like here. If I'm going to nitpick anything, it's just that it's not going to rewrite the genre. Dice placement is dice placement but this is one I would consider to be a very good dice placement game.

Final Thoughts: Shelfie Stacker is a love letter to board gamers and the hobby itself by one of its more notable designers. It's an enjoyable puzzle that is extremely accessible to just about anyone. I had a great time with the game and I can see it staying in my collection as a pure nostalgia high. There is something so satisfying about trying to organize your shelf. I hope to be this organized one day or maybe I should hold off for the expansion where you can stack games anywhere there's space.

Thanks to Arkus Games for providing a review copy.