Junkart Revolution

What does art say about a person, that they have good taste. Perhaps that they are wealthy, or maybe it's just randomly shaped junk thrown together to make a statue.

In Junkart Revolution, you and up to 6 other players take on the role of aspiring street artists invited to a global competition. You will travel to distant cities and create statues using whatever random junk you can find in the city. How does this translate to gameplay? Inside the box are 60 colored wooden pieces divided into 4 colors that you will stack on a base to create the tallest statue in a kind of reverse Jenga. The game includes 14 city cards and you will randomly select 3 for each game. Each city has different rules on how you will build your statue, in some you are working communally on one statue and the player who drops the most pieces loses, while another has you play a trick taking game to bid on the pieces you build with. There are also randomly selected bonus point cards for some of the cities, things like if you place a piece and it doesn’t touch a similar color get a point. Normally a round is over once someone's statue collapses or a certain number of pieces have fallen. At the end of the game the player with the most points wins the game.

The component quality is good for the most part, the wood is solid and I have seen no chips or nicks even after multiple falls. The cards are all square shaped and are where all of my complaints about component quality come from, after only a few games I have already seen some card separation. Most of this probably stems from how hard it is to shuffle these square cards, and shuffle them you will, multiple times per game. I wish they had just used standard card sizes that would have made shuffling easier and I could more easily source card sleeves if I wanted to. As it stands, this is the one black mark in an otherwise quality game.

Some of you may be asking, how does this compare to the 2018 game Junkart? The short answer is that this is just a reprint of that game. The long answer is this game is Junkart with some rule revisions, a couple of new city cards, the player bases are now wood, and it all comes in a smaller box. If you already own the original Junkart I can see no reason why you would purchase this game. There is not enough new stuff in the box to justify a full priced reprint. In the future, if they start making expansions that are only usable with Revolution, that opinion may change, however I do not know how they would make it compatible with one version and not the other seeing as how both are so similar.

Junk art is a fun game that scews more to a family game night or a small gathering of friends looking for a quick game. Do not go into this dexterity game thinking you will have complex decisions or strategies to make. The game still boils down to grabbing a wooden piece and trying to balance it on top of another piece. That being said, the cities do offer some variety to gameplay changing how you decide on the piece to use. However some of the cities are very unbalanced with point gain. One city may take 10 minutes to complete and give you a ton of points, but the next game may be over before you even get a turn to do anything. However, when the whole game only lasts about 30 minutes it’s hard to get too competitive.

Overall, Junkart Revolution is a good reprint of a fun game. While I may complain about the card quality and lack of depth, what I can’t complain about is the laughter and jokes coming from the group as we played this. If you don’t already own Junkart and are looking for a quick dexterity game to add to the rotation that isn’t just Jenga, then look no further.