In my house Dr. Eureka is derisively referred to as Dr. Jekyll. No other game has offered such a dual experience of fist pumping joy and back breaking anguish. Half the table seems to be throwing high fives while the rest of us poor schmucks are hanging our heads and asking if we can assemble a five man team to pull Cthulhu Wars off the shelf and wash the acidic taste out of our mouth.

Dr. Jekyll is very much a case of the have and the have nots.

It does have a sense of style.

You can't deny this game is as clever as that quack of a chemist on the cover. Part of its brilliance is in its simplicity: a card is flipped showing a pattern and players race to adjust their personal test tubes by arranging colored balls in stacks to meet the requirements. That's it, flip a card and away we go like Secretariat blasting out of the gate.

The patterns will show stuff like the far left test tube needs to have a green ball on top of a purple ball. The middle requires an orange on top of a green, and the right a purple on top of an orange. The starting position has two of each color isolated in their own tubes.

Everything is beautiful and the feel of the game can touch you like some good comfort food. Picking up cute plastic science kit cast-offs and shifting contents back and forth between vials is kooky in a maniacal laughter sort of way. There's a fantastic tactile element as the sound of marbles clacking and rolling down plastic tunnels is oh so satisfying.

The stupidity of it all only deepens the appreciation. As you're trying to shift a purple ball into a different test tube so it can lay atop an orange you fumble. You see, you're not allowed to touch the spheres with your hands, only their containers. So you're picking up tubes and trying to utilize gravity to adjust their contents. If any of the balls fall out and hit the floor you're toast and have to sit out for the remaining 10 or so seconds while suave fly-by-night science stud Jimmy finishes and yells out "DONE!"

At least Jimmy doesn't have a real job and is living in his parent's basement, bumming rides to game night. That's what I tell myself after he kicks my rear every. single. time.

This is where Harvey Dent's non-photogenic side comes in. Much like the pattern matching game SET, Dr. Eureka is a game of pure skill. It's a race and the first one to correctly manipulate their beakers takes the card. The first to five cards wins and it's Jimmy every damn round. Even when Jimmy can't slum a ride and make it out of the basement he still somehow wins. It's uncanny.

Dexterity games are fun. One's with a touch of the cerebral are even more so. However, when you setup each round to score a single winner with no consolation you place a huge unforgiving barrier to those who fall behind. If you're not Jimmy you get nothing. Good day sir.

So after five rounds when Jimmy is sitting there smiling you just want to throw your beakers at his ugly face. With a game like Coconuts or Rampage I can at least sit back and marvel at how many cups I claimed or that one impossible shot I made across the map. With Dr. Jekyll I can muse on that one round where I was half-way there before Jimmy yelled done. Those that struggle will never complete a puzzle and never accomplish anything really.

This criticism can be applied to most games that rely on speed. However, most of Dr. Eureka's peers feature players competing in a shared physical space. SET has you groping for patterns in a public pool of cards, Ghost Blitz has participants quickly reaching for objects in the middle of the table, and Jungle Speed has you engaging in a slap fight with those sitting across from you. By centralizing the action and challenge a sense of drama and conflict emerges that can provide a tangible atmosphere to revel in. You can talk trash, you can valiantly hope to get lucky and spot the pattern before your foe, and you can have fun when it doesn't fall your way. It's a shared experience of communal failure and competition.

Mr. Eureka on the other hand (yes, I'm revoking his credentials), is best classified as dexterity/puzzle multiplayer solitaire. You're working in your own confined space and isolated from your opponent's actions. You do feel that time pressure but often the round will end as you're still trying to figure the damn puzzle out. In this case you have to now revert all of your tubes back to their starting position with a low grunt.

Losing often is not a problem. Some of my favorite games I've never won. The problem is that losing still needs to be fun. When it ceases to be then you're isolating the enjoyment of the game to a single participant. That's when a game stops getting played.

Images courtesy of Blue Orange Games and Chris Norwood/BGG.

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