Junk Art is a challenging and creative game where players play as travelling artists and try to turn everyday pieces of junk into magnificent art creations in various cities. This game is suitable for aged eight and above. The game is for two to six players and it makes a great party game as it’s fun to play together!
Junk Art is available to buy from Esdevium store finder and Amazon and either comes with wooden (RRP £64.99) or plastic components version (RRP £34.99). We have the wooden set and it includes a total of 60 wooden Junk pieces (15 pieces in each of the four colours), 6 black wooden bases, 60 fan tokens, 60 Junk Art cards, 15 City cards, 1 Start player, 1 Special Star card, 3 Cactus cards, 1 tape measure and Instructions.
This game contains more than ten game modes (15 City cards including 3 blank City cards to create your own). The game begins by randomly choosing three cities from the 12 available city cards. One of these cities requires a copy of Flick ‘Em Up, so if you don’t have this, there will only be 11 cities you can play. But of course, you may use any number of City cards in your World Tour. It is your tour after all.
To set up, each player gets a base, distribute the Junk Art cards depending on the city, place the Junk pieces within reach and the last person who visited a real art exhibition is to start the game.
Each city has a slightly different twist to the objectives and scoring system, but all involve some method of stacking wooden pieces to form a sculpture and points are awarded in different ways. After the final city, the player/artist with the most points is the winner.
This game requires steady hand, knowing how to balancing pieces and a bit of luck! Also a sturdy table! It is very frustrating when your opponents accidentally push the table while you are balancing the pieces. We did get that quite a lot that we had to ban everyone from resting their arms on the table! We were deadly serious to be the best artist!
We played a range of cities and I personally love playing the Philadelphia city. In this game, you deal with three Junk Art cards. You get to keep one card for yourself, and give one card to both players that are adjacent. It is always fun to give the worst cards to your rivals especially the Junk Art that are shaped like a dumbbell and ball which are more difficult to place.
I love that there are many different variations of this game. In some cities, it involves building on a common structure, some only award points to the tallest structures, and some is all about speed and accuracy. There are also blank city cards in the box to allow you to come up with your own rules.
We’ve not tried the plastic set, but we love this wooden set which gives the pieces an assured weight which gives you confidence to try more balancing more intricate structures. Each piece of Junk is well made and brightly coloured.
We all enjoy this game and I can see that it is a game we will play again and again especially with young and old. It is fun and challenging for all of us. I would recommend it.
Disclosure: We received the sample for the purposes of writing this review, however all thoughts and opinions remain our own.