Today we are going to take a look at a game featuring some of the biggest supply of wooden pieces I have ever seen in a box. The game involves building, guessing and climbing your way to victory. Let’s take a look at Bilder and see how it delivers on production and gameplay.
Bilder is published by Monkeyshine Games. It plays 2-12 players for 45 mins of gameplay time.
Gameplay
Bilder involves using the 40 custom wooden pieces in the game to build the topic depicted on the WHAT cards. The first player to get it right gets the card. There is a stack of HOW cards on the table as well for players to draw and see three face-up cards from. (The game refers to the players who is doing the building as a “bilder” but or the rest of this review we will stick with the correct spelling for ease of reading.)
The game is over when a player guesses enough depictions to collect all the letters to spell B-I-L-D-E-R. The game ends and that players get +3 bonus points where all other cards are worth 1 point. Highest score wins!
The HOW cards add a challenge to the builder, if you can make your card depiction while following the restrictions on the card you earn it towards your point totals. It is the only way the person doing the building can earn any points.
The game also allows for a more casual or a more hardcore experience by either leaving out the HOW cards or removing the HOW deck from optional play and making it mandatory with a time limit.
Impressions
Bilder has some very unique components. It definitely shines the most on the custom wooden pieces that it comes with right out of the box. I am a big fan of games that can play multiple players, so it has that going for it as well if you can keep enough layers engaged around the table with it.
However I am sorry to say that for me personally the game falls a little flat. The category topics are the letters for “BILDER” but they seem a little off with some of the clues. B=Beings, I=Imagined, L=Locations, D=Devices, E=Events and R=Rest. Some of the clues, especially those that went under “Rest” (everything else category) were a little too wide for anyone to guess. Specific categories for a game like this that at least helped push you in a general direction would be better.
Also the wooden pieces are good but I often felt like I just didn’t have something good enough to match what we needed. 5 meeple figures are nice, but a little more variety would have been better.
The front of the box, specifically the logo for the word “BILDER” is a little tough to read. This could be a bit of a turn-off in the store or on a friends shelf when players are trying to read and decipher what it says. It shouldn’t be hard to read, and this one definitely takes a second to figure out.
Overall Bilder has an audience in players looking for a party game that involves 3 dimensional building and guessing abstract terms on the cards provided. It can be played fairly casually or competitively but from our end we found it to be most fun when we played it casual and just tried to roll with the categories and the HOW cards. It was silly fun at our gaming table and sometimes that is enough to really have a good time with family and friends.
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