What is This Prickly Thing?

At our regular boba place, one of the owners brought in yet another odd game for customers to play with.  This one looked vaguely familiar but had no markings at all, no brand or name.  The lady who brought it in said she didn't remember what it was, either.  The place was busy and there wasn't a chance to ask more about it.


It was a wooden box with a grid of holes on all four upright sides and about twenty plastic sticks pushed through those holes.  With the sticks in place, it left room for five or six wooden balls at the top.  Clearly, the goal is to either bring balls to the bottom or prevent the same.

I was able to find the same exact game on Amazon and Temu, but with such generic names that they are clearly knock-offs of something else.  They were called things like Ballfall and Montessori Drop Game.  I do not link to sites that are full of knock-off games.

Now, if you Google the phrase "game with balls and sticks poked through holes" the top contender is ... KerPlunk!  Duh.  I remember KerPlunk.  But that's a game with a plastic cylinder instead of a square box.  Apparently, there is quite a debate about whether KerPlunk is even a game or not.  Most people just find it annoying.

I found one contributor on BGG (Spinoza1967) who wrote a surprisingly detailed analysis about why he thinks people are hating on KerPlunk! unfairly.  It's not really a board game, not really a puzzle game, not really a dexterity game.  As the BGG contributor pointed out, it's a spatial reasoning game.  It's a good read.

So I have yet to find the exact game we found at the boba place is.  It's clearly a cheap knock-off of something, and to me it has the feel of something that will turn out to be a popular game somewhere in Asia.  You can't Google something as generic as "ball and stick game" as you will get almost every sport from around the world.



I found a good match, but it was a knockoff with a gibberish name on walmart.com: "3-in-1 Wooden Leaning Tower Game with Colorful Sticks, blah blah blah" and here's a youtuber showing how it is played.  The one at the boba place did not have the multicolored die to roll to tell you which color stick to pull next, but pieces get lost quickly in public places.

I will see what else I can turn up, but for now, it's just a chance encounter I thought I should share.

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