From Russia with love

Or more accurately, from the Soviet Union as it was back then. In the 1950s a couple of scientists decided to start an experiment to see if they could successfully recreate the process of the domestication of dogs. They took a group of Silver Foxes and selected those with the ‘friendliest’ traits to breed over successive generations, to see if what had happened over thousands of years in the past, could happen again.

When I heard about the theme of The Fox Experiment, it sent a small shudder down my spine. I had initial worries about the ethics. Reading up on the subject though, it seems like my original concerns were unfounded. Not only were the foxes not subjected to cruelty (as far as anyone can tell), but the experiment formed part of a rebellion. The Soviet Union officially rejected the current understanding of genetics and instead promoted the work of Trofim Lysenko.

You came here for a game review, not a history lesson, I know, but bear with me. Lysenko’s work was based on pseudoscience, and the rejection of Mendelian genetics (he didn’t believe that genes existed!) lead to thousands of scientists who refused to abandon their views to become destitute, imprisoned, or even killed. The same Trofim Lysenko was later responsible for the practices in the Soviet Union which led to famines not only in his home nation but also in China where his practices were adopted. Read up on him, it’s enlightening to say the least.

So if you coming at this with a preconception of ‘crazy Russian scientists doing weird, inhumane experiments’, think again. The work of Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut (the aforementioned scientists) was important and put them at great personal risk. This game pays homage to the work they did, and it does it without throwing a history book at you.

A chip off the old block

Gameplay in The Fox Experiment seems more complicated than it is in reality. Each turn, you’ll each choose two foxes – a mummy and a daddy – to have a special cuddle which will result in a baby fox. Ask your parents. Each fox card has trait dice associated with them, which you collect and then roll in order to create your babies. The way the dice work is fun. Some faces have a whole symbol, some half a symbol, and some one-and-a-half. Once rolled, you line the dice up and place halves next to one another to create whole symbols.

Each symbol you create lets you take one of your dry-wipe markers – that’s right kids, this is part roll-and-write! – and colour in the dots and boxes on your next pup card. Perhaps the most adorable thing in the entire game is that each pup card has a space for you to give it a name! I’m not very creative when it comes to naming pups, so my games have had plenty of Steves, Fionas, and Ians. The pups you create go to the kennel (i.e. selection pool) for the next round of the game, hence carrying forward the most prominent genes for successive generations.

This game makes me feel unreasonably sad when my pups aren’t chosen in the following round. They just go to the discard pile. Poor little Susan fox. I have to think of the discard pile like it’s someone’s home, and they’ve just adopted a new, potentially dangerous pet.

“Look, papa, bitey Susan has crapped in your slippers again”

It’s a really clever way of baking the genetics of the subject matter into the genetics of the game. Selectively breeding foxes actually passes the chosen traits on to the next generation, which in turn gives more dice for each trait, increasing the chances of that trait getting stronger again in the following generation. It’s such a simple idea that it makes me wonder why a) it’s not been used more often, or b) why I’ve missed the games where it has been used.

Complex strands of DNA

The Fox Experiment is an easy game to teach, but there’s still plenty of game bubbling away under the surface for those who like their games with a little more bite. For instance, each player has a player board full of potential upgrades. Unlocking upgrades comes at the cost of spending trait tokens, which you get from filling in more dots on the pup cards, as well as certain actions during the game. These upgrades give you things like more friendly (read: wild) dice to roll each turn, or most interestingly to birth more pups each round. Pups make prizes!

It’s not a case of blindly picking traits and going with them, either. You each start with a study card too, which rewards you for managing to generate certain numbers of different traits each turn. Another unlockable on your player board grants you more study cards, offering more opportunities to score more points. Then there are the randomly selected patrons for each game which can reward you for accomplishing various things in the game, but only if (you guessed it) you unlock the ability on your player board.

Add to that science cards which offer you bonuses at specific points during the game, and the clever turn order selection which can give you some nice bonuses, but at the expense of having later picks at the kennel in the next round. There’s plenty here to keep your brain busy if fawning over the cute little foxes doesn’t do it for you. Don’t be put off just because appearances make it look lighter than it actually is.

Final thoughts

I only really have a couple of issues with The Fox Experiment, which is pretty high praise. Firstly is my odd emotional connection with the foxes I’ve bred and named, only to watch them immediately disappear into obscurity. I’m just too darn touchy-feely. The other problem for me is the artwork. The symbology is great, very easy to understand throughout, but the saturation and variety of colours in the game makes it hard to pick things out at a glance. It makes the table look really busy. I think that might be a ‘me’ problem rather than a design issue, but who knows?

Another thing to bear in mind is whether you intend to buy the game primarily for two players. When you play with any number fewer than three players, you need to run an AI opponent. All it really does is help to take cards out of the market and steal turn order spots, and it’s not difficult to do, but it is just another thing to do on top of playing your own game. With three and four players I think The Fox Experiment is at its best. You only have three actions to take in the first stage of the game (take a fox card twice and claim a turn order space), but agonising over which thing to leave on the table when you know others may want it is great.

The components are great, from the colourful custom dice down to the oh-so-cute fox meeples, and I really like the big tarot-size cards. I think using the dry-wipe pens and cards was a really clever move. The designers could easily have just stacked dice on the cards to go in the kennel display, but people love to draw on cards, and come up with names for their pups. It gets you personally involved with your foxes’ lineage. The Fox Experiment is a great middle-weight game with a decent amount of indirect interaction, a solid theme which is really well integrated, and quick, snappy gameplay.

Review copy kindly provided by Pandasaurus Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Fox Experiment (2023)

Design: Elizabeth Hargrave, Jeff Fraser
Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
Art: Joe Shawcross
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post The Fox Experiment Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The original Long Shot had plastic horse minis, which for some reason, I found a bit freaky. It also had cards. Lots of cards. Long Shot: The Dice Game does away with the cards and goes dry-wipe crazy, with horse ownership cards and player boards you can write on. If you’ve played Just One before, you already know just how satisfying it is to use those little eraser things on the end of the pens. Teeny tiny bouts of satisfaction, every time.

And they’re off

The aim of the game is simple: have the most money at the end. You and your fellow gamblers choose which horses to bet on, and whether to throw all your money at one, or spread it over lots of nags. Long Shot is a roll-and-write game. In each round you roll a couple of dice; one of them shows you which of the eight horses is going to move, and the other tells you how many spaces around the track. Sounds like the dullest roll-and-move ever when it’s described like that, but it isn’t.

The super-clever, super-interesting twist comes in the form of horse cards. Each horse in the race has its own card, and each card serves two purposes. Firstly, they’re up for sale. That’s right, you too can become the proud owner of a race horse! Owning a horse is a good thing, as they have abilities which are activated whenever that horse is chosen by the dice of destiny. The other upside to horse ownership is a payday if your nag is in the top three places at the end of the race.

Each horse card also has a series of checkboxes at the bottom of the card, some of which come pre-filled. This is the really juicy, fun bit. If a horse moves because its number comes up, any of the horses with a filled checkbox at the bottom of that horse’s card get dragged along with it. It’s almost like that horse is super encouraging, turning around and going “Come on you lot, you can do it!”

Bingo!

As well as moving the horses around the track, the coloured D8 also lets you do the fun bit, the strategic bit where you write on your player boards. You can spend your dollarbucks on bets for the selected horse, invest in them to be able to bet on them after they pass the ‘no more bets’ line on the track, or do the bingo board. The game calls them ‘Concessions’, but I call it the bingo board.

Every time you complete a row or column on the 4×4 bingo board, you can claim one of the one-time bonuses from the chart below it. Free bets and extra money are up for grabs, but also a few uber-powerful abilities that let you move horses forwards – and backwards – around the track. After a game or two you’ll notice people saving these movement bonuses up until the end of the game, and it makes the last third of the game fantastic.

People will cheer, and others will curse, as that horse that was one space from winning gets shunted back three spaces. It’s incredibly satisfying to see the horse you bet on coming through strong, after it spent most of the game just ambling around the track at its own pace. When the first three horses cross the line, you cash in your bets using the multipliers on the player boards, and add any bonuses. The gambler with the most money is crowned KING OF THE HORSES! Probably.

Final thoughts

Long Shot: The Dice Game, despite having a really annoying name to type, is great. It got a load of buzz earlier in the year when Shut Up & Sit Down featured it, and with good reason. In truth, I bought into the hype too, and I’m glad I did. The wooden horse markers are really chunky and satisfying, and so much less creepy than the plastic ones from the original game.

It does what all good something-and-write games do, which is to make it really satisfying to fill in space on your board. Those mini dopamine hits from comboing things together isn’t as prevalent as in something like Hadrian’s Wall, but it’s still very satisfying. The game feels pretty chaotic most of the time, and for some people that’s a deal breaker. This isn’t a game of deep strategy. It’s a game of laughs among a group of friends.

Speaking of groups, having a few players is where the game does best. The full player count of eight would drag I think, but four or five players is awesome. The game moves along fast enough to not outstay its welcome, and there’s plenty of banter and competition for horses. There are different sets of horse cards to keep things from getting stale, and there’s a really decent solo mode too, seeing you face-off against the AI called Roland Wright (…). When it’s in stock, it’ll set you back less than £30, and if you regularly play with a group who enjoy the lighter stuff too, I’d really recommend picking up a copy of Perplext’s game.

Long Shot: The Dice Game (2022)

Designer: Chris Handy
Publisher: Perplext
Art: Clau Souza
Players: 1-8
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Long Shot: The Dice Game Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The Gig is a new mixture of genres to me. When it comes to board games, regular readers know I love roll- or flip-and-writes (I refuse to call them verb-and-writes), and while I’ve tried lots of different kinds, I’ve never played one with a real-time element. That kind of lunacy goes hand-in-hand with the Jazz Fusion vibes the  game’s art gives off. Have Braincrack Games got Ron Burgundy’s jazz flute in their hands, or something more like Ross’ keyboard?

More cowbell

The idea of The Gig is novel. Each player is a musician in the same band, but it’s a jazz improv band, and they all want to be the centre of attention. Each player’s instrument board is different, and the aim of the game is to cross out polyomino shapes on it, in order to score the most points. The biggest score at the end, wins. You know the drill.

In most games, the shapes you draw or place would be dictated by a symbol on a card, á la Hadrian’s Wall, or a cardboard tile, like in The Isle of Cats. In The Gig, however, each song (round) is a blank sheet of music. All players roll their dice at once, then the craziness begins. After rolling, you can pick up any number of your dice and plonk them on the row of the song which matches their values. It’s first come, first serve, so you need to be fast.

When all the dice are used, and your friends have stopped cursing each other for claiming the one place they desperately needed, it’s time to get your Bob Ross on, and get drawing. The shapes formed by your dice are the shapes you can draw on your instrument board, following a simple set of rules. Fill in your board, claim the bonuses, and get out under that spotlight as often as possible.

Nice…

The Gig is another departure from the more serious Euro games we’ve seen from Braincrack. Ragusa, Venice, and Florence are all great games, but after the light-hearted Last Resort, I’m really pleased to see them trying something different again. Not only trying, but succeeding. Before I go any further, I want to give a special mention to the artwork through the game. The styling is very cool, and so thematic, I love it.

The first song or two that you play feel a bit chaotic, but once you get the feel of it, and the way the dice interact with your boards, it’s a chaos you can embrace. It’s the difference between listening to freeform jazz and wanting to plug your ears with cheese, and suddenly understanding it and snapping your fingers in nodding appreciation, daddio.

It’s worth noting that there is an alternative, turn-based way to play the game. It’s great for teaching new players the game, and also if you’re playing with anyone who feels too pressured trying to place dice on the song sheet. If you can though, the real-time mode is definitely the way to go, it’s frenzied and hilarious.

Polytempo

One of the things I really like about The Gig is the asymmetry. Each instrument’s board is laid out differently, and each has its own way to score bonuses. It’s a really nice way to do things, as it’s going to take you a long time to figure out how to do each of them well. There’s this wonderful feeling that’s like doing the Hokey Cokey as a kid (or Hokey Pokey as my Transatlantic friends might know it). You all descend on the song on the centre of the table, rushing in to try to claim the spots you want, especially as many of them carry bonuses when claimed.

After that comes the calm, as your focus turns towards your instrument board, and trying to work out the best way to use the shape you created. It means there’s tons of interaction between the players, but there’s never any meanness or spite in it. You’re so focused on what you want to achieve, on your board, that any clashes on the song sheet are the result of both wanting something, rather than trying to deny someone of something. It’s a small, yet important detail, which makes the game a fun experience for everyone around the table.

Final thoughts

I really like The Gig. When Lewis (one of the designers and heads of Braincrack Games) tweeted about a new game that was a real-time roll-and-write, my interest was immediately piqued. When you consider the fact that the game is in no way a reflection of playing music at all, it’s remarkable that it feels so thematic. A lot of that is owed to the presentation and artwork. It screams ‘jazz club cool’, and it’s gorgeous. The songbook pages are really clear and easy to read, and even the box lid looks like an aged LP.

It does a great job of simultaneously feeling like a party game and a clever roll-and-write, which is no mean feat. There’s a stupid amount of variety in the game too, not just because you’re at the mercy of the dice gods, but also through the sheer number of combinations of songs and instruments. There aren’t many games around at the moment that give that same feeling of being a ‘proper’ game – for want of a better word – rather than a filler, and do it in half an hour. But that’s exactly what The Gig does.

Dávid Turczi has once again got his mitts on a game to make a good solo variant. While the solo mode is decent enough, and a good way to practice, the multiplayer mode is how to get the most out of it. So much of the fun and laughter comes from the madcap scramble to roll and re-roll your dice, over and over again, willing them to land the way you want. The Gig isn’t going to melt your brain, and I’m sure the theme might not land with everyone, but grab some friends and some smooth tunes, and you’re going to have a great time.

The Gig launches soon on Kickstarter. Register here to be notified when.

The Gig (2022)

Designers: Jamie Gray, Dann May, Robb Smigielski, Lewis Shaw
Publisher: Braincrack Games
Art: Dann May, Robb Smigielski, Lewis Shaw
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post The Gig Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Jamey Stegmaier conceived Rolling Realms during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to creating a game for any number of players, which can be played over video calls. Finding inspiration for the setting of a new game isn’t always easy, so Jamey leaned on the Stonemaier back-catalogue to come up with not one, but eleven settings.

Pick n mix

Rolling Realms is essentially a mixture of mini-games. The eleven mini-games are each based on one of Stonemaier’s existing games, so you’ll play something related to Scythe, Viticulture, Wingspan, Euphoria, Tapestry, and more. Each time you play, you’ll randomly choose nine of the eleven game cards. and play over three rounds, with three different cards in each round.

Roll dice, choose things to cross off, get resources and coins, and do stuff with them. The formula is tried and tested, and it works. Rolling Realms carries on in the same vein as something like Hadrian’s Wall or Cartographers, which means you get the same sweet little dopamine kick when combos start firing off, and a crossed box leads to another crossed box, and another, and another… When that feeling gets its hooks into you, it’s extremely satisfying.

As with pretty much every Jamey game, stars are the aim of the game. You get to cross stars off your cards for meeting certain conditions on them, and the skill of the game comes in combining the realms in play to maximise your scoring.

Breeding familiarity

Rolling Realms’ biggest draw is also potentially its biggest drawback too. If you’re familiar with Stonemaier’s games, playing this game is real fan service. It’s a lovely feeling when you’re playing on a realm based on a game you’ve played. I remember the first time I played the Scythe and Euphoria cards, I thought “ooh it’s just like those things in those games!”. It’s like getting a tub of Celebrations chocolates – little bites of things you love.

The problem comes when you don’t know the franchises. Between Two Castles means nothing to someone who doesn’t know the game. Viticulture is wine, sure, but there’s no context. It reminds me of trying to show my nine-year-old the cartoons I loved as a kid. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye saying “Sure dad, these are great…”.

I guess there’s an opportunity to make players familiar with Stonemaier games they’ve not played, but the mechanisms in Rolling Realms are so far removed from their source material that you couldn’t get a feeling for what the originating game is about. On the other hand, it’s a game begging for expansions and promos as more games join Jamey’s stable.

Balance enquiry

Rolling Realms is a perfectly good roll-and-write. The mini-games are god fun and offer up lots of different ways to approach each realm, and work out the best way to combine the ones in play. For a game whose genesis came from a want to create a quick game during lockdown, the balance is surprisingly good. With wildly different combinations of cards you can still expect similar scores whenever you play.

It’s a really easy game to teach, but the first few games can feel a bit stilted. It takes a turn or two to understand how each card works, but luckily the rulebook does a great job of explaining the mechanisms on each. I have no idea what’s going on with the dice, however. They’re gigantic, and a strange blue & green swirly pattern. On the one hand, it makes real sense for a game designed to be playable over a video call or game stream. Bigger = more visible. But the white pips on the different colours makes it hard to tell at first glance sometimes. It’s a small complaint, but it’s something that bothers me every time I open the box.

Final thoughts

Rolling Realms is a great game, and the smallest Stonemaier box I own. It sits in a funny space in my collection, somewhere between filler and main game. There’s a really nice solo version in the box, presented as mini-golf, where each hole is a challenge during play. As much fun as the solo mode is, the multiplayer is where the game comes to life.

It reminds me of playing Cartographers or Tiny Towns more than Ganz Schön Clever. Everyone starts in the same state, plays with the same cards, and uses the results on the same dice. I really like that in a game, there’s no bad luck to blame, it’s just your own choices which influence the outcome. It’s really interesting to see how different strategies play out when each round ends.

If you’re a roll-and-write fan and a fan of Stonemaier games, you really ought to get Rolling Realms. It’s cheaper at <£20 than a lot of the same sort of games which offer far less replayability. It’s still definitely worth buying if you just love this genre of game, just be prepared for the settings on the cards to leave you feeling a bit cold. A game with no theme is fine – Ganz for example – but when a game has a theme and you just don’t get it, it’s an odd experience.

Review copy kindly provided by Stonemaier Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rolling Realms (2021)

Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Miles Bensky, Marius Petrescu
Players: 1-6 (scalable to any number)
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Rolling Realms Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The Dark Imp has a goal. They want to help parents reclaim family time, getting kids’ attention away from screens, and playing physical games around a table, together. It’s an ideal I hold close to my own heart, as the dad to an eight-year-old who would do nothing but play and watch Pokémon and Minecraft if I let him. So, over the course of a few weeks, we all sat down together and played through the games.

Some of the games are lighter, only taking a few minutes to play, with simple rules. Some of them are much more like the sort of thing I’d normally be buying for myself, so I’m going to give you an idea of the games we played, what we thought of them, and the sort of ages each would fit best with. With that preamble out of the way, let’s get onto the games. It’s a lengthy post, as there’s a lot to cover, so here’s a handy little index to jump to whatever you want to read.

Coaster Games

Beach Life + Castaway (placemat games)

Cracker Games

Don’t Count Your Chickens

Top Cake

Doughnut Dash

Gnome Grown

Summary

Coaster Games

For whatever reason, my son immediately grabbed these out of the box. Something about the size and shape appealed, so before I’d even unpacked the rest of the games, we got started. All you need are some pens and some paper. The rules are on one side of the coaster, the game on the other side. A couple of the games were a bit too complicated for him, but we had three in particular that were big hits.

Alien Farm is a game of doodling aliens in a grid, taking turns to decide what you can place next. Points are awarded for certain placement rules. While I just added initials for the aliens, mini-me had to draw every single alien, and loved it.

Free The Frog is a cutesy thing where one player (the frog) thinks of a thing, then the others choose categories of clues to try to guess the word. It’s a nice, light work game that we had fun with.

Treasure Split is a game where each step of the way along the path each player secretly decides whether to split the money you find, or keep it for themselves. If everyone splits, they get a share. If one persons keeps it, they keep it alone. However, if more than one person tries to steal the lot, no-one wins. I liked the way the Prisoner’s Dilemma has been turned into a game, but no-one was interested in listening to me explaining the theory!

Beach Life + Castaway (placemat games)

These games make up opposite sides of a big A3 sheet, and that gave me a nice bit of leverage: “Shall we play this? It’s pretty big, so turn the TV off, we’ll go set it up on the kltchen table”. Beach life is what you’d get if you took Ganz Schon Clever and gave it a theme. It’s got a nice seaside feel, and the big boxes and clear instructions made it easy for everyone. You roll dice, use one of them to pick an area on the sheet, and the other to cross something off in that area. It’s cute and easy to explain, and everyone understood what to do within two turns.

My favourite of the two is Castaway however. You’re castaways on an island which is divided up into a grid. Roll a couple of dice, use the numbers as co-ordinates, then either harvest resources or build something. You do that by crossing things out or doodling structures and items. It reminds me of a cross between Cartographers and a brilliant little web game called Tiny Islands (check it out, it’s great). The strategy and options in Castaway would work better with older kids I think, but Beach Life was a hit for all ages here.

Cracker Games

We played this one back at Christmas, and I still have a draft of the review I never got around to publishing back then. Cracker games comes in a big cardboard Christmas cracker, but instead of a terrible (I secretly love them) joke and a paper hat, it’s stuffed full of wooden pieces to play games with.

The games themselves are fully-fledged mini-games, and I was really pleased to see a lot of mechanisms included in some of my bigger box games. IMPetuous and IMPrudent – speed and matching games, respectively – were the biggest hits with my son, while I really like IMPassive, because point manipulation is always fun. Due to there only being three of us we didn’t get to play the voting or racing games, but a scan of the rules showed me I’d have enjoyed them.

The real value for me came after we played the games. Along with the games there’s a booklet full of family game design challenges. I won’t pretend that we got through them all, as my son had a ton of new toys to play with, but what I really liked was what happened straight after our games around the dinner table. He took the cubes, imps and player screens (I told you it was proper game bits) and started making up his own games. The rules were… organic, let’s put it that way, and usually involved him ultimately winning, but that’s not the point. The seed was sown, and the spark ignited, and that’s where Cracker Games did what I hoped it would. It gave us a few of hours of good fun, and it engaged my son’s brain without the use of a screen of some kind. That in itself was worth far more than the few pounds the cracker cost me.

Don’t Count Your Chickens

When I pulled Don’t Count Your Chickens out of the box, I expected something light. It’s a game that comes in one of those little tins that you get mints or travel sweets in, and when you open it there’s a little rule book, some cards, and some cubes. The game you get to play with those bits is something you’d expect in a much bigger box.

It’s a game that’s half worker-placement, half hidden information, and it’s really good. You’re trying to collect chickens, roosters and turkeys, and collecting information which tells you how much each is worth at the end of the game. Each player has a rule in front of them, which only they know. It might say ‘Animal A will be worth two times Animal B’, or something like that. When you place your character card on an action, you might swap your rule for another, or to discover which animal Animal A is, for instance.

It’s a really clever little game, and although you’re perfectly entitled to make notes, I loved exercising my little grey cells and trying to remember everything. At first you’re just trying to figure out what animal is worth what, but then you’ll see someone read a rule and start collecting roosters like they’re toilet rolls in a pandemic, and you think “hmmm, roosters eh?”. But hang on, don’t go all-in on the rooster market just yet, because you might read another rule which says at the end of the game the person with the fewest gets to swap with the person with the most!

It’s a great game, and it’s probably better played with older kids and family members. My son played it, but was more interested in collecting as many yellow chickens as he could, because he likes chickens best. Don’t Count Your Chickens looks like the sort of game you’d pick up at the counter in Waterstones, but there’s much more to it. Hobby gamers will really enjoy it.

Top Cake

Top Cake is an auction game. In each round a variety of cake pieces (cards) are laid on the table. Each cake is worth different amounts, and can support a certain number of other cake pieces on top. Each player has a set of bidding cards, and place bids – face-down – for each piece. When all the bids are in, duplicates are removed, and the highest score wins the piece.

It’s a game of being cunning and bluffing, trying to second-guess your opponents. You each have Snatch and Reversal cards too. Snatch is an automatic win, while Reversal means the lowest score wins. Those are the most satisfying rounds to win, when you drop a ‘1’ card and a reversal and win a card everyone else has used their high value cards on. Impish indeed!

I love the way the artwork is implemented in the game. It’s not as abstract as just collecting some cards, each cake layer is stacked on top of the one before it, making a towering cake of cards on the table in front of you – even with a cherry on top!

I didn’t get to play Top Cake properly, thanks mainly to lockdown. I managed to get through half a game, but my boy lost interest. It’s a shame, because what I played I really enjoyed, and I can’t wait to meet up with others and watch their surprise when they see how much is packed into the tin. Much like Don’t Count Your Chickens above, I think it’ll work great with kids even just a couple of years older. In fact, I think with a group of adults and a couple of bottles of wine on the table, it could get downright hysterical.

Doughnut Dash

Onto the first of the two ‘big box’ games Ellie sent me. Doughnut Dash is a game where players are rival thieves, trying to steal the best doughnuts from a world-famous factory. The factory is littered with the sweet treats (and some ketchup ones too…), and on a turn you’ll each be planning movement, by playing movement cards. Movement cards, once unveiled, make your thieves walk in the direction on your played card, until they land on a doughnut or bump into a rival thief.

It’s an unusual factory, and in the tried-and-tested physics of classic arcade games like Pac-man and Asteroids, if you move off one side of the floor, you’ll appear on the opposite. Things are trickier than they seem though, as there are portals that open up, teleporting the thieves around the factory floor, and Sugar Rush cards which you can play to do things like change the direction of the card you’ve played. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, you’re moving two thieves at once. Both of them move in the same direction, so careful planning, making compromises, and choosing least-worst options is a must.

Doughnut Dash is a lot of fun. Kids will get fun from it just by moving in the obvious directions and hoovering up the colours they like best, but if you’ve ever played a programmed movement game before, like Robo Rally, you’ll really enjoy the nuances offered-up. You can often guess what other players might be doing next, based on which directions they’ve already used, and where things are in relation to them. So with some careful planning, you can predict where they’ll end up, and make sure that your movement ends on them, meaning it’s their tower of doughnuts you’re stealing from, not the board. This is especially good if you have a particularly competitive parent (cough, cough), because it means the others can gang-up and make sure they don’t build an unassailable lead.

Despite the saccharine sweet theme and colours, Doughnut Dash is anything but a ‘kids game’. True, kids will play it and enjoy it – mine loved it and demanded a second game immediately after the first. But again, and it’s something I find myself repeating in these reviews, this is a proper game, with proper mechanisms, and something that a regular game group of seasoned players will enjoy too. It’s a fantastic way of exposing families to the mechanisms and strategies that good, modern board games are built on.

Gnome Grown

Gnome Grown is the second big box game, and it’s my favourite. It’s my favourite because it’s a worker-placement game, and anyone who knows me knows that worker-placement is easily my favourite mechanism in a board game. Along with worker placement, it’s a game of tile-placement. Now we’re into Uwe Rosenberg territory, and I love Uwe Rosenberg games.

The setting of Gnome Grown sees the players competing to make the nicest gardens in their neighbouring plots. Players have objective cards with icons which will score them points if they manage to meet certain criteria, like ‘Have an owl, a fountain and some flowers in one section of your garden board’. To get those tiles, you need to put your markers on the action board, and this is the worker-placement part of the game. It’s great, there are loads of choices and lots of ways to either further your plans, or start playing catch-up if you feel like you’re lagging behind.

After planning actions, everyone takes their actions, buying up tiles and following the placement rules to add them to their plots. This is the tile-laying and polyomino-style placements come in. The shapes are simpler than in more complex games, which is good, given the intended audience of first-time gamers.

Like the other Dark Imp games, there’s plenty of interaction between players in Gnome Grown. One of my favourite things is the turn order bidding. In each round players have a tile which has a number on it, and shows in which order they’ll claim and take actions. At the end of the round, players take bid a hidden number of ladybirds, and all reveal at the same time. The highest total is the first player for the next round, and so on.

The twist comes in that you can also add your player order token to the total. So the player in third place this round only has to add two ladybirds to make a total of five, whereas the first player would need to add five ladybirds, as four ladybirds would tie (five each) and ties are broken by highest numbered turn order tile. That mechanism is really neat, I’m a big fan, it keeps the playing field level.

The theme might be more cutesy than my usual choice of dry, geographic Euro, but make no mistake, Gnome Grown is a great game. Not a great game for a family game, or pretty good with any other conditions. It stands up on its own as a great worker placement game. It’s not heavy, it’s pretty lightweight in terms of depth of strategy, but that’s perfect for what it is. You’re not going to get many ten-year-olds – or their parents – to sit down and take on A Feast For Odin or Bonfire without them having a terrible experience and swearing off hobby board games for life.

I’ll happily play Gnome Grown with you any day of the week. It won’t break my brain or leave me with strategies whirling around my head like the lyrics to some god-awful pop song, but I’ll have fun, and more importantly, so will everyone else around the table. Plus there’s a little gnome in the box. If that hasn’t sold you, I honestly don’t know what will now.

Summary

The Dark Imp make great games, and you can tell there’s passion behind everything Ellie Dix has touched. Ellie is clearly a hobby gamer, and I can see flashes of inspiration from other games and designers all over her work. Nothing is ripped-off, and there’s plenty there that feels fresh.

What I love about the lighter stuff like the placemat and coaster games, is that all you need is a bit of space and some dice and pens. What I couldn’t escape while I played all of the games, is just how well they’d fit in with holidays. You could throw a whole load of games in a bag and take them to a cottage or caravan, or even camping, and guarantee fun. The themes can, and do, appeal to anyone and everyone.

There’s a couple of games in here where I think you really need older kids if you’re going to try to lure them away from Minecraft and Youtube, because their exposure to board games up until now may well have been limited to Monopoly or some franchise tie-in cash-cow-milking travesty of a board game. But if they try these, and like some of them, they’ll have experience of mechanisms baked into the vast majority of modern board games. Worker-placement, hand-management, movement programming, auctions, roll-and-write, hidden information, polyomino laying – they’re all here, and they’re all good examples of them

If you’re the parent of a young family, or if you know a young family and you’re a hobby gamer yourself, I’d really recommend picking up a game or two and seeing how they go. Ellie’s mission is an important one, and one I feel a connection with. Screen time is okay, but we all need to get our kids back to social interactions with their immediate family, and what better way to do it, than with board games?

Games kindly provided by The Dark Imp. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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What’s In The Box?

Not much actually. There are six coloured dice, four felt-tip pens, which make up the ‘roll’ and ‘write’ parts of the game respectively. There’s a thick pad of scoring sheets which tear off, and the box insert has the silver dish printed on it (see the image above), which is used in the game.

How Does It Play?

The game runs over 4 – 6 rounds, depending on the number of players. On each player’s turn they take all six dice and roll them. Each colour relates to a different area on the scoring sheet, and players choose one to claim and then mark off a matching space on the sheet. The die is then placed in one of the three boxes on the score sheet.

Here’s where the strategy starts to come in, After you choose your die and place it on your sheet, any dice with a lower value go on the silver tray in the box. The remaining dice are rolled again and it all happens again, and then once more for a third and final time. At this point, the ‘active’ player now has three dice on their sheet, at least three boxes filled in on their sheet, and three dice on the silver tray. Then each passive player (i.e. the players not rolling dice) gets to choose a die from the tray, and cross it off their own sheet. Play now moves to the next player and the same thing happens again, until everyone has played and the round ends.

At the beginning of each round, all players get a bonus. This is either a re-roll to use at any point, a +1 which lets them claim an extra dice at the end of their turn, or a wildcard which lets them cross off/write a 6 in any of their boxes.

Each colour has a different method for scoring.

Yellow – cross out a box matching the number on the yellow die. Complete columns score points at the end, rows give bonuses during the game.

Blue – to cross out a blue number, the value of the blue die is added to the value of the white one. Complete rows and columns grant bonuses, and the total number crossed-out scores points at the end.

Green – each box has a number in. If you roll at least that on the green die, you can cross out a box. Bonuses are scored along the track, and game end scoring depends how far along you go.

Orange – just write the orange die’s value in the box. Some boxes double the value, and the game end scoring is the total of all the numbers written in the boxes.

Purple – similar to orange, you write the value of the purple die in the box. The only rule is that each die claimed has to be greater than the previous. Once you get a six, you can continue from one. As with orange, the game end score is the total of all the boxes

White – the white die is a wildcard and acts as any colour. If it’s used for the blue box, it has to add the value of the blue die.

The only other scoring mechanism are the foxes printed on the sheet. Each coloured box has a fox you can gain if you cross out the corresponding boxes, and at the end of the game players are granted a bonus of total number of foxes x lowest scoring area.

What really makes this game shine is the combinations you can set-up. Some boxes, when crossed out, let you fill in another on another colour. So for example, you might write a number into an orange box which lets you cross out a box in yellow. But that box you cross out in yellow might complete a row which lets you cross out a green, and maybe that green lets you cross out one in blue. It’s an immensely satisfying mechanic when you get it working for you.

Final Thoughts

Ganz is a great little game. It has almost no set-up or tear-down time, it can be played just about anywhere, and it’s small enough to fit in a coat pocket to take somewhere. It’s extremely easy to learn, and you can easily fit two or three games in in an hour.

I love the combinations when they work, and there’s enough strategy involved to keep you coming back again and again. I’ve played it over 40 times now, and I still enjoy playing it. And most of those plays have been solo, there’s enough game here to keep you coming back to beat your own scores.

Some people don’t like anything with dice, claiming it’s too chance-driven, and while that’s true to a certain extent, there’s plenty of mitigation available in Ganz Schön Clever. You get a few chances to re-roll during each game, and the +1 bonuses can help you use dice you didn’t get a chance to. But in all honesty, it’s just part of the fun. This isn’t complex Eurogame, it’s a lightweight roll and write, and should be enjoyed for what it is.

It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s fast, and it’s small. You should try it.

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