Octocube Review – A Family Game With Plenty of Suckers

Disclaimer: Octocube was provided for free by VR Distribution, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Octocube took me straight back to the Katamari Damacy games, those oddball games where you roll a magically sticky ball over everything in sight, collecting everything in sight from coins, to boxes, to buildings until you’ve built a lumpy masterpiece. Here, though, you’re not a space prince trying to create new stars. You’re an octopus stuck in a cube, rolling across the ocean floor scooping up tokens and victory points.

It’s a family-weight design from Karl Lange, hailing from my home country of Australia. Always nice to see an Aussie name on a board game box, so here’s hoping we see more from him. Now, onto the game itself.

How to play

Not to be confused with Squid Game, Octocube is about octopuses in cubes, rolling around and snatching up treasure for points. Before you can start collecting, though, you’ll need to get the ocean floor ready. Shuffle the treasure tiles, split them into small piles, and lay those piles out in a grid with space between them.

Starting with the youngest octopus, players take turns placing their octocube along the outer edge of the grid. Then on following turns you pick and carry out one of four actions:

• Roll your cube one space in any direction (no diagonals). If you roll over a pile, thanks to the power of magnets, the top tile sticks to the bottom of your cube… unless it’s already holding something.
• Pivot your cube, rotating it ninety degrees left or right.
• Pass and skip your turn, handy if you need to wait for a space to open up.
• Score your cube by bringing it back to your play area. Gain points for the number tiles stuck to your suckers (the more the better), then place all of the accumulated tiles on your player board which will score more points at the end of the game.

As the ocean floor empties, stacks are replaced with tiles that refuse to stick, no matter how much your octopus wants them. Once enough stacks are gone, the game ends and it’s time to see how you did.

Treasure tiles come in five types (diamonds, clams, sextants, vases, and starfish) and four colours. During scoring, you compare each type and colour against your opponents. For instance, when you compare diamonds, the player with the most earns 7 points, second place gets 4, and everyone else gets squat. Colours work the same way, with 5 points for first and 2 for second.

Once you’ve compared all the types and colours, add everything up to see who has the highest score. They win not one, but eight trophies… you know one for every arm.

It’s stuck with me

As my son gets older, we’re looking more and more at my shelf of games and realising two-thirds of them are still out of reach for him. Not only because they’re too high up on the book shelf, but because they’re simply too complex. So when I saw that Octocube was lighter, family-friendly, and designed by an Australian (Karl Lange), I knew it was one I had to try.

Octocube is a tried and true set collection game, of which I’ve seen dozen upon dozens, but never have I seen it presented like this. Rolling cubes across the ocean floor to collect tokens felt surprisingly fresh as a tabletop experience, while at the same time it carried a sense of nostalgia thanks to all those rolling block puzzles in video games. Mario Galaxy came to mind immediately.

On the table it worked beautifully. The constant bumping into opponents, plotting your path to the right tiles, and figuring out which sides of your cube were still uncovered created a loop that was both novel and satisfying. I felt a genuine pang of disappointment when the game ended because I just wanted to keep rolling my cube.

The rest of the game is built to keep that joy of cube rolling front and centre. Scoring is kept light-weight, the set collection is straightforward, and nothing in the rules slows down the fun. Keeping the game fast, tactile, and easy to pick up.

The magnetised tokens are another clever idea, and the octopus theme sticks everything together nicely. One charming detail I need to call out is that each token is double-sided, showing one face while it sits on the ocean floor and another with a tentacle when you collect it. It is a charming detail, although the team at Sit Down! are dreaming if they think I am going to flip every single tile for each set up.

Rolling right into family time

When it comes to family board games, Octocube ticks all the boxes I care about. The gameplay is fun for both kids and adults, it is quick enough to teach and play before young attention spans drift away, and it looks eye-catching enough that my seven-year-old does not immediately turn up his nose when he sees the box.

Octocube delivers on all of that and comfortably sits alongside some of the better family games I have played recently, like Captain Flip and Kingdomino.

That said, there are a couple of caveats.

Setup is a little fussy, since you need to stack and line up quite a few tokens. The rulebook helps by including tips, and it is a lot quicker than many games on my shelf. Still, because the gameplay itself is so snappy, setup can feel more labour-intensive than it really is.

The other thing worth noting is that Octocube plays best with more players. The joy for me was in the interactivity, cubes constantly crossing paths and stopping you from enacting your plans. With fewer players there are fewer cubes in motion, which also means less of the interactive fun I enjoyed most. The set collection on its own is not enough to carry the experience.

Even so, Octocube makes for a wonderful family game. It takes about twenty minutes from setup to pack away, turns move quickly, and everyone picks it up almost immediately. And once you finish counting up the score, if you are anything like me, you will be sitting there wanting just one more roll of the cube.