How can I put this tactfully? PICKUP wasn’t designed for me. I can’t say with any confidence that it was designed for anyone. The production is sloppy, with flimsy cards and poorly cut edges that dust your table and fingers with abrasive flakes of paper. The design and art are uncredited. For a dice game, I’m not sure it understands what makes dice interesting. The game doesn’t even come with rules. Not all of them. There are three modes, starter, party, and classic. Only the rules for the party mode are included in the box. And let me tell you, “party” is a misnomer.

Classic, though? Classic isn’t awful.

Getting buckets.

At heart, PICKUP is a dice game. The gist in all three modes is that you’re playing pickup street ball. To score, you pick a shooter and roll a pair of dice. If the number matches one of the shooter’s “shot zones,” you compare their offense to the opposing guard’s defense. The difference in those values is how many points you scored.

Or, to use the game’s parlance, you “got buckets.” I unironically love that. It has such pop to it. Every time I watch a basketball game, I’m going to talk about getting buckets until my family asks if I’m okay. Wow, did you see Malone get those buckets? Stockton, help him get those buckets! Man, I need a bathroom break. Gotta get a bucket.

The other thing I unironically love about PICKUP is the art. Rookies are reedy dudes just learning to hold the ball. Veterans, the other card you start with when playing classic, are frizzly-haired grandmas. There are long-limbed dunkers and stocky bald dudes and chicks with thicc thighs. It’s stylized to evoke the spread of bodies you actually see tossing balls back and forth at the community center.

To some degree, those bodies are complemented by a range of abilities that only make sense once you start to dive into the classic mode. Where the lighter modes focus on dice-rolling and little else, classic is about maintaining a roster across a… season? A single drawn-out match? I dunno. It doesn’t matter. Half of the game is a deck-builder where you either spend your players’ “value” to recruit better players or keep them in rotation long enough to score points — sorry, to get buckets. The other half is effectively a lane battler. Think Air, Land, & Sea, Omen: A Reign of War, or The Old King’s Crown, except you’re staffing lanes with players that both shoot against and guard whichever player stands opposite them.

Lining up for buckets.

As lane battlers go, it’s breezy. Your goal is to get forty buckets before the opposition, but this isn’t always a simple task. I mean, scratch that, it’s simple, but it isn’t easy. Whoever designed this thing has played enough deck-builders to understand some of the genre’s essential questions. Your roster is always undergoing a shakeup, usually because somebody has flubbed a shot or failed to guard properly, potentially leaving lanes wide open. Similarly, some characters are team players while others are stars. It’s useful to keep their abilities in mind when staffing the court.

Perhaps best of all, it’s nice and pacey and full of cool moments where an improbable roll results in a bunch of points. Buckets. Whatever we’re calling them.

That said, it doesn’t really know what to do with its dice. Every character has their own set of shot zones, the range of numbers they hit baskets on, and some sport abilities that modify those zones. Ankle Breakers ignore opposing defense values when they roll a 7, Dimers add 2 and 12 to their teammates’ shot zones, and Lockdown Defenders rob those probability-riding 7s from their opponents.

That final ability is all-important because every character scores on 7. Which is nice enough, I suppose, it being the most probable result to come from a 2d6. But this also strips the game of any opportunity to play the odds or develop its cast. Apart from a couple of obvious combos, there isn’t much sense of developing a complementing team. Safe shots are the best shots, and abilities that give 7s additional points seem to be missing the point of a sport where riskier shots are literally worth extra. It’s a game entirely without buzzer beaters, without the reversals of momentum that make basketball worth watching. Even its best sessions feel like a series of free throws. I thought we were playing street ball, not horse.

Baling out my sinking ship with buckets.

Like I said, though, it isn’t awful. It’s Target shelf fare, the sort of thing somebody picks up because the kiddo shoots hoops, shares a session or two, and then disappears into a closet full of worse titles. How it came to land on my table is something of a mystery even to me. But there’s value in experiencing games and art that weren’t made with us in mind. Maybe next time it could bother to include the full rules in the box instead of redirecting to a web page.

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A complimentary copy was provided.