OK Play isn’t the usual sort of thing I write about, but… um…

All right, look, I don’t have an excuse. Deep down, all we’re doing in this hobby is playing with toys, and OK Play looked like it would be fun to play with. Not necessarily by following its rules, but just by clicking it around. It’s sixty little squares of plastic attached to four prongs that are connected to a carabiner. And yeah, it’s a lot of fun to goof around with. I basically use it like a stress ball or fidget spinner. Clickety clack clickety clack. 10/10.

Oh hello, females.

The rules of OK Play, on the other hand, might sound familiar. Each player gets fifteen squares, and on their turn they put one on the table while making sure it abuts another square along an edge. The goal is to connect five of your color in a row, including diagonally. The game’s pair of twists — though, spoiler warning, we’re really stretching the definition of “twist” — are that you can expand in any direction and that running out of your fifteen pieces means you’ll now be picking one up and relocating it each turn.

And it’s fine. As you might expect, it’s can easily devolve into a sort of intro-to-philosophy game theory deadlock, wherein you and a friend move the same pieces back and forth until the only solution is to take the district attorney’s plea bargain and hope your buddy didn’t take it at the same time. It plays better with three or four people than with two, if only because it means there’s some strategy to purposefully not blocking an opponent’s successful line in order to force somebody else to waste their time on it.

It isn’t devoid of brainpower, is what I’m saying, though it’s got smarts the way a potato is a clock battery.

OK Play in practice.

Then again, OK Play’s tiny size and carabiner do clearly out it as a travel game. It’s the sort of thing you toss into a tent trailer cupboard or squirrel away in the console in the car, ready to pull out and distract people for a few minutes. There are games I’d rather play in those moments — Hive springs to mind — but you really could do a lot worse than having this thing around. The fact that it’s good for four players isn’t a bad thing either.

And as I said, I have it mostly for the clacking, and there’s very little substitute in that regard. My three-year-old loves it.