Put Your Hands to the Test With These 7 Great Dexterity Games

Dexterity games are a great way to get your hands involved in something more than moving a mini or drawing a card. These seven great games will have you flicking, stacking, and grasping all sorts of neat components!

Palm Trees is a brand new dexterity game from Wizkids Games during which you make trees…with your hands. Ergo: PALM Trees. Get it?!

The concept is simple: Opponents take turns handing cards to one another worth varying amounts of points, each of which also has rules for how it can be held: Between the pointer and ring fingers, between the thumb and the palm, etc.

The trickier the holding rule, the higher the value you’re putting into your opponent’s hand, but the difficulty might just cause them to drop some of their cards and thus trigger end game scoring.

As the number of cards in your hand increases, so does the challenge! And if the table proves dextrous enough to make it past the palm fronds and into the coconut cards, things get even dicier.

The components of this game also deserve some praise. The cards themselves are very flexible plastic, which makes sense because no paper cards would hold up under the creative placements you’ll have to concoct in order to keep all your cards in hand.

And the game comes with arm sleeves that turn your forearms into palm tree trunks. This is one of my favorite game components ever. So fun!

You can snag a copy of Palm Trees here for around 20 bucks.

In Dr. Eureka, each player has three test tubes that holds two green balls, two red balls, and two purple balls. At the start of the round, a card is flipped and the first person to match the design of the different colored balls in the different tubes wins. 

But you can’t ever drop a ball and they have to always be in a tube; you can’t just remove one to the table and replace it later. This makes the game a great challenge of both logic and dexterity. Logically, you have to work out how to move the balls around to match the pattern and it takes a fair amount of dexterity to do it quickly. 

Dr. Eureka is definitely a fun crowd game to both play and watch! Snag a copy here.

Flick ‘Em Up is a Wild West themed dexterity game that utilizes flicks to move pawns around a board or fire weapons at enemies.

The game comes stocked with a bunch of scenarios, set pieces, and props. When you set up any given scenario, it very much has the feel of an old western movie set where the buildings are just facades. It is super cool!

It features various takes on the cowboys or lawmen versus the outlaws, with each side trying to flick their way to victory. You might even get into a duel or two!

Flick ‘Em Up already has two expansions, and there is a less expensive plastic edition, a deluxe wood edition, and even a zombie version. All are quite nice and hold up to all the blunt force trauma you’ll be inflicting on pretty much every component in the game.

Junk Art is brought to you by the same folks that brought us Flick ‘Em Up, so you know you’re getting into something quality.

In Junk Art, cards are used to determine which pieces of “junk” you must affix to your base as you seek to build the highest tower without suffering too many (if any!) collapses. It also has several different game modes that shake up the standard mode of play, including a bit of a crossover mechanic that brings pieces from Flick ‘Em Up to the party!

Some of the game modes rely more upon careful construction and balance. Others ramp up the difficulty by incentivizing speed. Some play like trick takers, others like card drafters. There is a surprising amount of variety built right into the base game; no expansions required.

Junk Art also comes in wood and plastic!

Pitch Car combines every young boy’s love of constructing wicked cool Matchbox Car tracks and a flicking mechanic to bring racing to the tabletop.

Part of the fun of this game comes from the setup itself. Even with just the base set, you can have a lot of fun designing a racetrack that tickles your fancy. There are also several expansions that include all sorts of extra fun bits that introduce things like ramps and even elevation changes and junctions. There is a lot of customizability to this game, for sure!

Once the track is set, players take turns flicking their piece around the track trying to avoid flipping their car or driving off the track in the process. It really is as simple as that! But don’t let this simplicity fool you. Pitch Car offers a ton of fun for all ages.

You can grab the base game here.

Tokyo Highway has opponents building the infrastructure of a twisting, branching, and stacking highway system, then placing cars on the resulting roadways. The careful and nerve-racking engineering of this Spaghetti Junction usually ends in a giant collapse. You’re just working extra hard to ensure you’re not the wrecking ball!

We’ve actually got a full blown review of Tokyo Highway complete with lots of pics of the engineering fun you’re in for, so I’ll direct you there.

You can find Tokyo Highway on Amazon here.

Kung Fu Zoo has players flicking dice into an arena and trying to knock their opponents’ dice into small holes to remove them from the game. If that’s all it was, I’m not sure we’d be talking about it, though!

The game has an animal theme, and each of the four animals has special abilities you can utilize each turn to manipulate your dice to your advantage.

The dice themselves have faces that represent the head, feet, rear end, and sides of the animals, and those faces determine what you can do with them or what their point value is – depending on the game mode you’re playing.

It is a bit like billiards, but with fun animal dice! Super simple and plenty of fun, with a play time that’s listed as 5-10 minutes. The total lack of setup makes Kung Fu Zoo a very quick game to teach and play for just about any age.

You can wrangle up a copy here.