Floating Floors

Ninjas are known for their agility and light touch. It’s what allows them to sneak so effectively! In Floating Floors, each ninja player must be a master of agility, strategy, and dexterity.

Floating Floors is a tactical dexterity game designed by Takashi Sawada, and it’s published by CardLords in the US.

Setup

Start by choosing ninjas. In a two player game, one player must be white and the other must be black. Take a meeple, starting spot, and bansen (cardboard goal tiles) matching this ninja. Then take three wooden jutsu in your color, one of each shape.

Then set out a grid of Terrain tiles – six cards in a two player game or nine cards if you have more players.

Each player puts out their ninja starting spot in the middle of one of the Terrain tile edges. After this, lay out the bansen seals, in alternating order, going clockwise from the starting player’s spot.

Now everyone has a starting spot and the same number of bansen that they’re trying to retrieve. Let’s start the game!

How to Play

To start your turn, roll the jutsu dice, then take jutsu matching the three you rolled. Most of the time you’ll take these from the supply. But you can also take them from the gameboard and if you really want, even under the floorboards!

Once you’ve taken your three jutsu, you can do any of the following actions:

1. Place Jutsu

Take one of your pieces and place it on a Terrain or floorboard. It can’t be placed in the water or under a floorboard, and must only touch a single space. You also can’t stack jutsu.

2. Place a Floorboard

As long as there is at least one jutsu for it to balance on, you can place a floorboard above a terrain. The edges need to line up, more or less, but you can place the floorboard either side up. Only one floorboard per terrain, though – no sandwiches here!

3. Move your Ninja

Pick up your ninja meeple and put it down on an adjacent space. It must be touching its own color, so you’ll be putting it down either on a matching colored floorboard space, or on a jutsu piece. You must let go of the meeple and make sure it balances after each step of your movement.

4. Claim Bansen

If your ninja is in the space adjacent to where one of your bansen seals is “hidden”, you can attempt to claim it. Pick up the entire floorboard, rotate it a quarter turn in the direction shown on the bansen seal, and put it back down. As long as nothing fell you have successfully claimed this bansen – and your turn ends.

Repeat as Desired

Other than claiming bansen, you may do these actions in any order and as many times as you are able. You can place all three jutsu and then a floorboard, you can place two jutsu and then a floorboard and then move and then place another jutsu, etc.

If you did not use all your jutsu, you may keep up to three in your color for a future turn.

Collapse!

However! If you cause a floorboard to touch the Terrain for any reason, or if a meeple or jutsu falls off a floorboard – your turn immediately ends.

The next player in turn order gets to rearrange ALL the pieces and the floorboard from that area. They can even flip, rotate, or move pieces from above the floorboard to below – or vice versa. Once they’ve finished rearranging, they begin their turn.

Whoever claims all their bansen immediately wins the game.

And, if you want more difficulty, the rulebook provides eight challenges to tackle and three ways to balance the difficulty between players of different skill levels.

Impressions

Games from CardLords always have a unique tweak. But there’s nothing that gave me the sense that we would be reclaiming bansen seals that contain ninja secrets. Even knowing there’s some dexterity involved, we couldn’t tell at first if this game was more about dexterity or more about tactics.

Art

We loved the ninjas in Floating Floors. The combination of two colors and two stances made for four unique ninjas with a lot of personality. The artwork is just right to make them look cute without being childish.

The terrain and floor cards have plenty of detail to keep them from being a boring grid, but not so much that it overwhelms the grid information. And they’re just a little slippery – making it easier to set up traps for your opponents!

Family Play

But even though there are four ninjas available, we think Floating Floors is not great as a family game. Younger players had to move around the table to reach every spot on the board.

We thought more players would feel less mean and more chaotic than at two, but instead it just felt kind of unfair. More players mean fewer bansen for each ninja to collect, which also means it’s easier for a player to jump way ahead, even if it’s only because of an opponent’s unsteady hand.

At four players, a player only needs to collect two bansen to win. In that situation, every player needs to be playing defensively from the very start, or someone can win after just two or three turns.

And you can’t really play defensively without being cruel, setting up traps where it’s impossible to move across the floor without unbalancing it.

Since the only possible outcomes of a move are success or catastrophic failure, there aren’t shades of grey in the level of success a player can have. That can be really hard when you’re playing with players (kids) of different ages.

Best for Tight Dueling

In the end, I do like Floating Floors. The more I played it the more I like it. But I like it best with just two players. Its unusual combination of dexterity and tactics make it feel like a meaty challenge that still goes pretty quickly. I’m looking forward to trying the additional challenges in the rulebook.

And even with just two players, they have to like dexterity games where you are going to have to force your opponents to fail if you’re going to win. There’s not a lot of kindness to go around when you’re ninjas racing to protect your secrets.

Find Floating Floors on Amazon, direct from CardLords, or look for it at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Floating Floors from CardLords for this review.

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