Players: 2-3
Playing Time: 15 minutes
The Components
You can see the wackiness of CDM3000 as soon as you look at the components:
Bowls: A large plastic bowl and three smaller resin dishes. The soft plastic bowl is nothing of particular note, but the resin dishes are quite nice; the other players presumed they were glass which they fortunately are not.
Wooden Bits: Twenty-five colored wooden items comprise the items that you're trying to collect in the game. They're disks, cubes, stars, hearts, and spools in five different colors (green, purple, red, blue, and yellow). The different shapes result in different experiences when you're trying to grab things with your chopsticks: the spools are quite hard while others like stars are pretty easy. The different colors are an additional differentiation, though I found some of them a bit hard to tell apart at first (notably the yellow and purple which were both quite faded).
Thirty round-tokens show you what you're trying to collect. Each shows one of the five shapes in either one of the five colors or a rainbow of colors, thanks to a sticker affixed to each token.
Chopsticks: A set of six chopsticks, allowing for play by up to three players. I suspect they're going to end up being a little fragile for the rigors of gameplay, but if they break, I'm sure it's very easy to find replacements.
The quality of the components is just fair (other than the great resin dishes), but the pure big-picture stylings are terrific. This is the only game of chopstick combat that you're ever going to see, and it seems just perfect for Japanese pop culture. It's upon that basis that I've given CDM3000 a "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
There are two variants to CDM3000, the Preliminary Game and the Championship Game. In each variant players are trying to transfer specific items from the bowl to their own dishes in each round of play.
Goals: In the Preliminary Game, the rainbow tokens are excluded. A token will be revealed each round, depicting the target. When a token is revealed each player collects as many as he can of the shape or color shown.
In the Championship Game, the rainbow tokens are included. When a token is revealed each player tries to collect the precise item shown (by color and type) unless it's a rainbow token, in which case they try to grab the majority of the item type.
The Combat: There are some ground rules to the combat. You're only allowed to manipulate things with your chopstick. Using them, you can grab items, move the bowl, and bash your opponent's chopsticks, provided they're still over the bowl.
You can't hit your opponent, nor can you knock things out of his chopsticks when they've cleared the bowl. (Though we never had problems with the first restriction, we were always tempted to keep going after an item even when an opponent had gotten it away.)
Winning a Round: When a player has placed the item required to win a round in his bowl (or the majority of items if there are several), he wins that round of play. He takes the target token as a victory marker, then all the items are returned to the bowl.
In the three-player variant of the game, he then sits out the next round.
Winning the Game: A player wins the game after he's won some number of tokens. Five is the suggested number for first-time play.
Relationships to Other Games
There's nothing like Chopstick Dexterity MegaChallenge 3000, though it feels like exactly the sort of game that you'd see on Japanese television.
The Game Design
Chopstick Dexterity MegaChallenge 3000 is a super-light game, and as a result there's not a lot to talk about in the game design. You fight for wooden bits using chopsticks, and that's about it.
I was surprised that the chopsticks were a lot easier to use than I'd expected. I do use chopsticks when I have Japanese, Chinese, Thai, or Vietnamese food, so I'm not a raw beginner, but I've never been that great with them. However, grabbing wooden bits turns out to be a lot easier than squishy food items, and so my moderate level of expertise turned out to be more than enough for the game.
Beyond that, I'll just comment that the ability to move not just the pieces, but also the bowl added a little bit of tactics that I wouldn't have expected, and definitely improved the game.
Overall, I had quite a bit of fun in my game of CDM3000 when I hadn't really expected to. I've thus given it a high "3" out of "5" for Substance: slightly above average.
Conclusion
Chopstick Dexterity MegaChallenge 3000 is a very wacky dexterity game that's pretty much unlike anything else you've ever played. If you like amusing games with hilarious themes and goofy gameplay, this is the one for you.
