Tabletop Gallery (Wii U) Review

By Nikola Suprak 25.04.2016

Review for Tabletop Gallery on Wii U

Tabletop Gallery is a compilation of three little dice games previously released in the US, all put together in one package for the dice rolling connoisseurs out there. Any of these three games are the sorts of things that can be played at home, without a video game console, and really don't get more complex than "roll the dice and then do it again." It is the game destined to be hidden away on the depths of the eShop, gathering cobwebs as people confuse it for something that might've been released on the PC back in the early 1990s. It's time to dust off the cobwebs and figure out if this mini-collection of games is worth rolling the dice on.

There are three games in Tabletop Gallery, and a grand total of zero of them are worth playing for more than a couple of minutes. The "best" is perhaps Shut the Box, a dice rolling game where the numbers rolled correspond to values that can be eliminated from the board. There is no actual box in this game, presumably because this was put together on such a shoestring budget that the developer needed that box to work out of, and, instead, number tiles are laid down on a board. There are three rows of numbers 1-9, then 9-1, then 1-9 again all on top of each other. The dice are rolled and after each turn it is possible to remove tiles adding up to the numbers the dice shows. When it becomes impossible to remove any tiles adding up to the throw of the dice or when the board is cleared, the game ends. It is a passable way to kill the time for roughly five minutes until boredom sets in, and this is the highlight of the package.

Next is Poker Dice Solitaire Future, something that sounds like it was a mistranslated name for a robot in a Japanese anime, but is instead a fairly standard Yahtzee clone. Five dice are rolled, and there are three rolls per round where the object is to get the dice to match up to one of the various goals. Five of a kind, a full house, two pair - it is all the same sort of things that are the goals in Yahtzee, only instead of playing against someone else, the only opponent is crippling loneliness. It is fine, but certainly not what most would consider fun, again falling squarely into the category of a passable way to kill a couple of minutes and nothing else. There is a way to track high scores on both of these games, but the greater question is why anyone would even bother.

Screenshot for Tabletop Gallery on Wii U

Finally, there is Toss N Go, a two-player game that can either be played with a friend or an AI so atrocious I'm worried it might actually be concussed. Ten dice are rolled and will either come up green (which gives a single point), orange (which allows for rerolls), or red (which ends the turn and causes all points earned in that round to be lost). Green dice are put aside, and the orange and red can be rerolled. If all the remaining rolled dice show red, the round is ended and the points banked in that round so far are lost, but at any point before a roll the points can be banked and the next player gets their turn. It is another boring game in a collection of boring games, only made notable by how laughable the AI is.
Multiple times the AI had gotten all ten points possible in a round, but elected to reroll anyway and lost everything because for some reason the round doesn't automatically end when ten points are earned and they have to be manually banked first. The AI is the drunken guy at a blackjack table hitting on 21, and they do it almost every time. It makes it utterly worthless to play unless a real, human partner is found.

That is everything there is to know about this title. It is a three-game collection featuring three games that aren't worth playing. It is unlikely anyone out there will buy this intentionally. There are so many better options on the eShop that it should never come to a point that this becomes a title in someone's wishlist. Sure, it's cheap, but so is a bag of rotten apples and no one would want to buy that, either. Everything here can be completed in the span of around five minutes, with almost no incentive to give any of the games another go. The target audience seems to be fans of boredom, but this might be a little too extreme even for them.

Screenshot for Tabletop Gallery on Wii U

Cubed3 Rating

3/10
Rated 3 out of 10

Bad

Tabletop Gallery is little more than a time waster - something to pass a couple of minutes with here and there, while waiting for dinner to warm up. There are only three games included, and none of them are worth the time it takes to load them up. It feels like a very basic package of games that comes preloaded on a computer when it is purchased, and buying this would be like buying Minesweeper and Solitaire, only these games aren't nearly as fun. It doesn't matter what the price of this is, because whatever it is, this is still overpriced. It could be free and still feel like a rip-off, and this package would need like ten more games and at least one good one before anyone should even consider checking it out. No need to roll the dice here; it's going to come up snake eyes every time.

Developer

RCMADIAX

Publisher

RCMADIAX

Genre

Table Games

Players

1

C3 Score

Rated $score out of 10  3/10

Reader Score

Rated $score out of 10  0 (0 Votes)

European release date Out now   North America release date Out now   Japan release date None   Australian release date Out now   

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