Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
It’s a simple deck of cards, split between draw and discard, with the back of the draw pile showing whether you’ll place a girder or a hot man — along with the color of the girder you’re being asked to place or the color of the girder your hot man will rest upon — and the front of the discard pile providing a twist of placement that must be observed. The addition of an incentive like Boss Rita arriving and handing out awards really takes away the “win by playing it safe” tactic, which leads to much more interesting games.
Men at Work comes with a number of different set-up options and a cardboard crane that can be used to balance girders on. To make things even crazier you can combine all 3 of these variants if you want a much more chaotic experience. The structure is stable enough in general that you don’t have to hold your breath, although players do have to be careful not to jostle the table.On their turn each player turns over the top card of the construction deck and places it next to the deck, adding to the discard pile. If you ever played something like Rhino Hero, or built a house of cards, and enjoy creating these teetering erections, you’re really going to like Men At Work. Men At Work is a stacking and balancing game in which players compete as workers on a job site who are carefully constructing a tower to avoid accidents and, maybe, earn Employee of the Month. Having to do two bricks, one on each shoulder, is just an automatic loss for whoever has to do it whenever we play.
After all, Men at Work is a dexterity game, so the difficulty comes from placing the pieces on the construction site. Then of course there is the absolute outburst of exclamations and laughter when the whole work site collapses. Other times you’ll be asked to lay a girder across a hot man’s ample shoulders, or balance it atop only one other girder. We can't even get them to sit on one shoulder with the worker standing just on the table, let alone while sitting on girder and trying to move it one handed.
This provides a whole load of extra angles for your girders and balancing becomes far more difficult on a sloping surface.
Sometimes the surest-fingered player is tasked with the impossible, just as those with palsy might be told to plop a girder in any old place. It’s a little ghoulish at times, especially after an entire square dancing line of hot men has plummeted to their deaths. I think the reason being is I feel like I have my own fate in my hands, and that I have a sense of control.Secondly, and most importantly, the game is so short that even when someone gets eliminated relatively early, they only tend to have to watch for 5-10 minutes before the game ends. For a dangerous building site, a player may win if they are the only one who has not been eliminated. Balance and dexterity games are becoming more and more common, but for us at TGR that s definitely not a bad thing. The best worker wins – depending on the number of players, earning a certain amount of Employee of the Month awards wins the game. The hook I mentioned above is for hooking fallen meeples and pieces out from under the construction, which turns into a part of the game itself.
Men at Work combines stacking with a fun theme to create an experience unlike anything else in my collection. The next player will then use the rescue hook to remove any debris from the site before continuing their turn. You must balance workers on the girders and, to make things even more nerve racking, your builders may have to carry little wooden bricks or wooden beams on their shoulders.
The winner is determined by safety certificates and Worker of the Month awards depending on the condition that ended the game. The cleanup hook has a handy measuring stick on it for those situations in which the highest piece isn’t clear.
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