Water Works

My family has tons of games. We have an entire game closet, shelves of games in my office, shelves of games in the playroom and even games in the living room. We have way more than we can play, and some we’ve never even played before! So we’ve decided to go through all of the games in the next few weeks, playing the ones we’ve never played to find out whether we want to keep them or not.

When I first looked at Water Works, I have to admit I thought it would go into the toss pile. It’s an old game, and it looked like it was just a bunch of pipe pieces (which, essentially, it is). But it turned out to be pretty fun, and both Indy and Wood Sprite loved it, so it’s a keeper!

Basically, you just have to build pipes with your cards. If you have a leak card, you can use it on another player’s pipe in order to create a leak. The player cannot move until she or he fixes the leak, either with a suitable card or a tiny wrench piece. Each player gets two wrenches. You have to make a pipeline out of so many pipes in order to win.

It seemed confusing at first (there are different rules for different pipe pieces, for example) but eventually we all got it well enough. I think it would make an excellent critical thinking game for math classes (I totally think math classes should be based more on games—I know I always learned best when we did “brain games” in algebra) as well as a suitable game for general play. We may bring it with us to co-op this semester.

Have you played Water Works? What did you think about it?

Photo courtesy of Sara S.