Blockhead!

with dice!

Blockhead! is a 1952 block stacking game from Parker Brothers. It's been issued over and over through the decades, making it a classic.

I like it for drawing the eye at both indoor and outdoor game events. It's great for entertaining children or getting casual gamers involved. You can play it just once, or follow the rules and play until every player except once has toppled the tower three times, making them successively Squares, Characters, and Blockheads - delightedly dated slang. You can also incorporate objects that aren't even part of the game, such as blocks from different sets, random small toys, dominoes, etcetera.

The variant I want to mention here is to add color dice. In normal Blockhead!, you add one block to the tower each turn, see if it falls over, and that's it. The simplest of games. But one day, I stole a pair of dice with colored circles on each side from The Reef and decided on a slightly more complicated set of rules:

The first player starts things off by placing a single piece. (Whether this is a sedate base or a dangerous slanty-cornered thing goes a long way toward determining how hard the round will be.)
After that, each player rolls the dice on their turn and add two pieces corresponding to the colors of the dice.
Since green and blue Blockhead! pieces exist on an ambiguous continuum, those pieces all count as blue. Rolling green on a die is wild: you can use it to place any color of piece.
You may place pieces with both hands at once if you like.

Otherwise, the existing rules apply. I find this variant makes the game feel richer and more exciting! Some players will look for the easiest block of any color. Some will place both blocks together, others one after the other. Oranges are an especially challenging thing to roll because all the orange pieces are roly-poly cylinders. (Though my set has a couple other orange blocks added for variety.)

Have fun and don't be a Blockhead!

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