Menara is a cooperative dowel-drafting dexterity game. Your objective is to build a towering temple by carefully placing your dowels (on the coloured spot that they belong) according to a randomly drawn instruction card.

Sometimes you get lucky and you only have to place a dowel or two. Sometimes you have to finish up an entire temple tile with the dowels that you have in your hand. Sometimes you draw the card that tells you to move an entire level to the next level up. You just never know!

When we played Menara in store last week, using our rental copy as a demo, we made the mistake of playing it on our wobbly Game of the Week table. DO NOT PLAY MENARA ON A WOBBLY TABLE, it will just make you anxious. Or do and revel in the anxiety. I'm not your mom.

You place the bottom row of tiles (three of them, when we played, all touching) and draw six dowels from the bag to make up a camp. On your turn, you can assess the coloured spots and compare them to the colours in your hand and swap them out for the dowels in the camp, if you'd like. Then you draw a card that tells you your placement rule this turn. There are three different difficulties of tile, but not all of the more difficult options can be accomplished early on in the game. Bear this in mind, because for each placement tile that you can't complete, you have to build another level of tower!

We only played it once, but out of the six levels (four initial levels and two added through the hubris of taking too difficult a goal), we only accomplished three before the tower came crashing down.

Darn wobbly table...

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Not only do we have the new Star Wars Shatterpoint, we've got all of your Star Wars Shatterpoint dice, terrain and squad needs! We also have some cool new metal dice, a box of the Wave 1 Kidrobot D&D plush charms and a super rad new little friend in the store. Come down and see if you can spot our Quasit!