Yubibo exists to reveal which member of your group has selfish proprioception, a sentence I never could have conceptualized until I experienced a friend, with a dozen sticks poised between his fingers and those of four peers, suddenly rotating his wrist all the way around to arrive at a more comfortable position. Six other players were sent lurching in response, doing everything in their power to maintain the pressure on those sticks. It didn’t work. Foam balls and wooden sticks clattered to the table. Everyone laughed.

Balancing the balls is technically the advanced mode. Usually the sticks are hard enough.

Yubibo feels like a game invented, playtested, and marketed in a dumpling restaurant. The gist couldn’t be simpler. You draw a card — very quickly itself a feat of balance — to reveal which player you must balance a stick with. Which player and which finger. Your brother-in-law’s ring finger. Your daughter’s thumb. Your own birdie finger, which means anybody’s birdie finger of your choosing.

Early on, this is a simple ask. Two people can hold a stick between them. No problemo. Kein problem. Mondainai. Another stick? Sure. How about a third. What is this, a game for children?

I’ve tried Yubibo with children, and let me tell you, it takes some willpower to keep more than a couple sticks above the table. My older daughter can manage alright, although her wrist gets tired after a while. My six-year-old? Forget it. She has the greediest proprioception I’ve ever seen. This isn’t something I could have known about her until she tossed an entire handful of sticks onto the table, noping out of the game after three minutes. Was her hand hurting? “I just don’t like this game,” she insisted.

Even with adults, it only takes one go around the table, maybe two with a smaller group, before you start to feel it. Not only the burn, although Yubibo excels at finding the muscle groups that have atrophied from disuse. No, it’s the sheer jittery tension that comes from coordinating with other human beings, but not quite touching them. The sticks become power cables. Tension bridges. Bonsai wires. When someone in the group shifts — even when it isn’t someone you’re holding a stick with — you feel every movement, transmitted like a message through multiple intermediaries. Someone rolls their finger to accommodate a second stick and the entire collective vibrates.

Terror.

At its easiest, Yubibo is just about balancing sticks. In case you’d like to try out for your country’s gymnastics team, you can also try to stuff foam balls in between the sticks. Why would you do this? Because it transforms you into Mr. Miyagi trying to honk a clown nose. A hivemind Mr. Miyagi who, if you’re anything like us, lacks basic coordination and couldn’t beat up a gang of skeletons if his life depended on it.

I think strange thoughts while playing Yubibo, which is undoubtedly bad practice when it comes to focusing on all those sticks. I look at that shifting forest and wonder if this is what the connections in our brain are like, tensing and flexing as they produce consciousness. I see human society, this magnificent construct barely held aloft through faith and determination. I see a family. Then I lock eyes with someone across the table and the spell breaks, and more often than not I feel the tremor in my knuckles and the whole thing begins to come apart.

Yubibo is a quick game. It’s an easy game to teach. Unlike some balancing games, I have my doubts that it’s quite winnable. Oh, the rules provide a metric. A certain number of sticks. In my experience, those are best ignored. The game shines when you play it with all the stuff. When there’s no purpose but the cascade at the end. Not every game needs to end in victory. Sometimes, just holding it together for one more go-round the table is enough.

The most cursed image ever featured on Space-Biff!

There isn’t much more to say about Yubibo. This once, that strikes me as a good thing. Ten minutes, lots of laughter, lots of failure. The sticks clatter, the foam balls bounce away. So, too, goes whatever was cluttering my headspace only a few moments ago.

A complimentary copy of Yubibo was provided by the publisher.

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