Preview: Floating Floors

The Bansen seals of your ninja clan have been stolen. Can you get them back before your opponents? Collect Jutsu to support your floating floors. Your ninja will have to travel the path of light or dark over the floating floors to retrieve the Bansen seals. But ninja be ware the floating floors may not be as stable as they seem. Join me as we take a look at the upcoming game from Guf Studios, Floating Floors by Takashi Sawada.

Floating floors is a game of balance. You will build out a series of floating floors on a grid of cards. Each card is a 3x3 grid with some land and some water spaces in the grid. You may only place your Jutsu on the spaces that are land. The floating floors (Another 3x3 card) will sit on top of the Jutsu. You will move your ninja meeple across the floating floors one space at a time to collect the Bansen seals from around the outside perimeter of the play area.

A turn in Floating Floors consists of rolling the 3 six sided dice and collecting the Jutsu that you rolled. The Jutsu may be collected from the shared supply pile, On top of the floating floors (as long as there is no meeple on top), or from under the floating floor. You may pick up the floating floor tile to collect the Jutsu from underneath but you must place the tile back in the same orientation.

Once you have collected your three Jutsu you may then proceed with doing any of the four actions. The four actions you may take on your turn are, Place Jutsu, place floor tiles, move your ninja and collect Bansen. When you place Jutsu you may place them on top of or under the floating floor tiles. When placing the Jutsu on the terrain tile they must not be on a square that is water. One ting to consider when placing the Jutsu a meeple may only travel on spaces that are their own color, unless you place a Jutsu of your color on the floor space that has the other color. Then you may travel on that square. You may only keep 3 Jutsu at the end of your turn for the next turn.

Knocking the tile down can put you in a very precarious situation that may set you back far in the game.

The second action is to place the floating floor tiles. You may place these directly above the terrain cards. They floor tile should not be crooked and not touching the terrain tile. Don't let the floor tile drop because your turn will be over right then and your opponent gets to arrange all the Jutsu, the floor tile and the meeples on the floor tile. Knocking the tile down can put you in a very precarious situation that may set you back far in the game.

The third action available is moving your ninja meeple across the floor tiles. You goal is to get to the squares next to the Bansen of your color and collect the Bansen. While moving you must place your meeple in every square and release the meeple. Don't fall or you will end your turn here too. While your moving you can use your meeple to adjust the Jutsu in the square you are moving into but all pieces must remain within the square.

The fourth thing you may do on your turn is to collect the Bansen. You must move to the square on the floating floorboard that is next to the Bansen. You will rotate the floating floor tile 90 degrees in the direction marked on the Bansen token. If at anytime the floorboard touches the ground or the meeples and Jutsu on the floor tile fall off then you do not retrieve the Bansen, your turn is over and your opponent puts everything back in the way they see best fit..

The game is over when a player collects their last Bansen. The game will offer several ways to adjust the difficulty to accommodate for players of different levels. Also in the rules I played there were 5 missions to go through to mix it up from the standard game. Each had a different way of changing the game rather than getting progressively harder they are just different scenarios to play and yes some of them were harder than others.

You may take as many of the four actions as you wish on your turn in any order and as many times as you wish. This game will defiantly introduce you into some balancing and dexterity skills, while still offering a game with great strategy. Floating Floors has a lot of replay value with all the different tiles and missions you wont play the same game twice. This game is currently on Kickstarter until the end of February so you need to get on this one quick!

Players: 2-4

Year Published: 2022

Recommended Ages: 14+

Time to Play: 20-40

Transparency Statement

A sample pre-production review copy of Floating Floors was provided to Bert's Tabletop Games for review purposes. Final products may vary from what is portrayed in this article.