Family Archives - Punchboard https://www.punchboard.co.uk/tag/family/ Board game reviews & previews Tue, 28 May 2024 15:06:08 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://punchboard.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/pale-yellow-greenAsset-13-150x150.png Family Archives - Punchboard https://www.punchboard.co.uk/tag/family/ 32 32 Feed & Breed Review https://punchboard.co.uk/feed-and-breed-review/ https://punchboard.co.uk/feed-and-breed-review/#comments Tue, 28 May 2024 15:05:46 +0000 https://punchboard.co.uk/?p=5272 Feed & Breed is a super cute push-your-luck game about rabbits trying to collect food and avoid foxes, and it's a lot of fun.

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Continuing my pledge to cover as many UK indie games as I can, I’ve been playing Feed & Breed from newcomer Martyn Hedges and his Scattershot Games label. It’s a super cute push-your-luck game about rabbits trying to collect food and avoid foxes, and it’s a lot of fun.

Fox in a box

The game is the same size as a standard deck of cards, which is an instant win for me because portability is key to lighter and filler games doing well. Among the 54 cards there are food cards with carrots and values on, foxes (boo! hiss!), and some natty tracker cards, which means you don’t need tokens to track how many bunnies or how much food you have. Nice.

It’s one of those games which I can explain to you in a couple of minutes, so while I don’t do rulebook regurgitations here, I want to emphasise just how easy Feed & Breed is to learn. On your turn you draw a card from the Forage deck, which is seeded with fox and food cards. If you draw a food card, you instantly gain that much food. If you draw a fox, you lose a rabbit, plus one additional rabbit per 10 rabbits in your warren. From there you get the juicy bit which appeals to the gambler in me, the push-your-luck phase.

fox and food cards from feed & breed
The cards are bright and colourful. There’s no confusion between foxes and food.

You can choose to keep drawing cards, but you don’t instantly get the food this time. You can keep turning cards for as long as you feel lucky. If you choose to stop, you add all the collected food to your tracker. If you draw a fox though, you lose bunnies again and all the food you’d drawn up to that point. Once you reach the end of the deck you do the feed and breed phase. Spend one food for every rabbit in your warren, then with any food left over spend it 1:1 to add rabbits. So for example if you had five food left over after you fed your bunnies, you add another five of the long-eared scamps to your warren.

That’s as difficult as the game gets, which makes it perfect as a lightweight family game, or a quick filler to start or end the evening.

Mental maths

The gamer in you who wants something more from a game than flipping a card and hoping for the best will be pleased to know there’s enough in Feed & Breed to keep your brain working. At the start of the game, you know how many fox cards are in the deck, and you’re never allowed to look through the discard pile to see how many of those foxes have come out already. For instance, if you’re in the first round of a two-player game, you know there are only three foxes. If you keep track of the fact that three have already come out, then you know you can go carrot-mad safely for the rest of the round.

tracker cards
The tracker cards are a nice way to keep track of rabbits and food. Just don’t bump the table!

As each player moves past each set of ten rabbits, however, you add another food and another fox card to the deck, and slowly the game gets a bit more awkward. It’s never difficult, but it’s a great test of memory and concentration for younger players. I really like the fact that it gradually gets trickier as the game goes on without ever getting hard. It also doesn’t drag on too long, which is another strength in a light game’s arsenal.

A game which fits in your pocket, tickles your brain, plays well with any age of player, and is done & dusted in 15 minutes? It’s a winner.

Final thoughts

There’s no denying that the market for small, light card games is heavily saturated. To make a dent in it you need to do something a bit different, and that’s what Feed & Breed does well. It doesn’t lean into the toilet humour themes which so many games do. You wouldn’t believe how many offers I see to look at some new ‘risqué’ games that I have no interest in. Instead, we’ve got colourful, beautifully illustrated cards which appeal to any age and player.

Feed & Breed is available from the print-on-demand store, The Game Crafter, and you can order a copy right here. I’ve spoken to Martyn, the designer, who tells me that there may be crowd sale later in the year which will drop the current $19.99 price, so keep your eyes open for that.

Feed & Breed is a cracking little game which you can happily play with the family and be done with in the time between ordering and getting your food when you’re out at the pub for tea. Push-your-luck distilled into a deck of cards with a cutesy theme you’ll love.

Review copy kindly provided by Scattershot games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.


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feed & breed box art

Feed & Breed (2024)

Design: Martyn Hedges
Publisher: Scattershot Games
Art: Aariel Cooper
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 15 mins

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Hideous Abomination 2nd Edition Review https://punchboard.co.uk/review-hideous-abomination/ https://punchboard.co.uk/review-hideous-abomination/#respond Tue, 20 Jun 2023 09:31:59 +0000 http://punchboard.co.uk/?p=1106 Ever fancied yourself as a bit of a Doctor Frankenstein? Did you spend your childhood drawing weird and wonderful creatures and monsters? If so, I think Hideous Abomination might be the game you're looking for.

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Update for 2nd Edition – June 2023

Hideous Abomination is back with a disgusting refresh for 2023. I looked at the original a while ago, and this new 2nd edition takes everything that made it fun and adds to it. There are some great quality-of-life improvements, such as drawing more cards and forcing a small hand limit to create three discard piles. A new Dig action lets players take a discard pile and search through it to find body parts in it, and this is great because it creates more churn, and means you’ll see more parts cards more often. There’s a full list of the changes and improvements right here.

The way bolts and stealing work is changed and feels a lot cleaner, and there’s a new side of the die which sees more of the Award cards churned out, and they’re not secret. This is great because now your monster with five heads, one hand, and eleven feet might be worth more points at the end of the game. Speaking of the die, the physical die itself is new and looks like a vertebra! I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

“Alas for my troubles! Can it be that her beauty has blunted their swords?”

When the new campaign goes live in the summer, it’ll be your chance to get the best version of Hideous Abomination. For families looking for something quick and easy to play and have a really good laugh with, Hideous Abomination is great. Don’t believe me? Just ask my ten-year-old son, who was extremely annoyed to find out that I had to send my preview copy on to the next reviewer. For less than 20 quid, backing it is an easy recommendation for me.

Original Review

Ever fancied yourself as a bit of a Doctor Frankenstein? Did you spend your childhood drawing weird and wonderful creatures and monsters? If so, I think Hideous Abomination might be the game for you. It’s a lightweight card game in a cool, cube-shaped box from Tettix Games. Gameplay is simple, but with plenty of scope for strategy, with a bit of take-that fun thrown in the mix.

Making monsters is cool. That’s not just my opinion, that’s a fact (probably). I’m sure many of you played that game when you were kids, where you draw a part of a creature and fold the paper down, then pass it to your neighbour for them to add a part on, and so on. Afterwards, you unfold the paper and roll around in hysterics at the bonkers beasts you’ve made. In writing this review I found out something I never knew before, that that game is called ‘Exquisite Corpse‘, and now you know it too. Well, Hideous Abomination is like a deluxe version of that game, but with proper rules, scoring and no artistic skill needed.

The game is really easy to learn. You start with a torso card – pick the one you think is cutest or most disgusting, whatever floats your board – and then roll a die. That die will let you do things like take a body part card from the market on the table and add it to your monster, steal a part from someone else’s monster, or maybe even bolt parts onto your monster so no-one else can take them. You just have to follow the rule that says that loose ends (connecting edges) have to meet, and you can’t leave an unfinished arm/leg/tentacle/what-the-heck-is-that-bit-coming-out-of-its-neck?.

a monster in hideous abomination
Isn’t she pretty!?

Monster mash

While you’re picking what parts to add to your own abomination, you can check the award cards in play. These show you which body parts will score at the end of the game. For example, the cards might show that you want as many teeth, horns, and legs on your creature as possible at the end, as those are what give you bonuses. That means competition for those parts is really high, and you’ll find yourself praying for bolts sometimes to secure those really good bits you’ve stitched onto your creation.

As well as these scoring cards though, you’re also competing to finish your monster first, and to have lots of body parts in the same colour, as these things score too. It’s daft, hysterical fun the whole way through, and if you’re playing with kids, the chances are a lot of the time they completely ignore the scoring cards. And that’s okay, it’s meant to be fun.

hideous abomination monster with bolts
Fingers and eyes scored well in this game, so I bolted-on the bits that scored well.

Judson Cowan is the man behind the monsters, and he hand-drew every single one of the 190(!) body parts. This game was never a quick “make a monster game to make some cash” affair, it was a personal project with a lot of care and attention to detail lavished at every step. The cards themselves are hard-wearing and feel nice to shuffle and play with. We’ve played it inside, outside on a picnic table, on the carpet with the dog, and just about anywhere else you can think of, and the cards still look brand new.

I have fun playing it whenever it’s brought out, which is often. The random scoring tiles mean there’s plenty of scope for someone who considers themselves a hobby gamer to enjoy strategy and planning, the die adds a nice random touch, and there’s a 33% chance of being able to bolt-on a good bit every time you roll. That’s important, as it means you’re as likely to secure parts as you are to steal them. There are simpler variants included on the rules sheet, and it’s a game ripe for house rules. If you have young children who’d get upset at you stealing their parts (and that’s really tempting at times, my inner Competitive Dad is strong), treat the stealing rule as a re-roll, or an extra choice from the market – something like that.

Final thoughts

Hideous Abomination is what it is – a quick, funny, easy-to-play game. The illustrations on the cards are fantastic, and full of character. Disgusting enough to be monsters, but not graphic, so kids can happily play this too. It plays a lot like Castles of Caladale, a tile-placement game from Renegade Game Studios which flew under the radar for a lot of people. But instead of building castles without bits ending in empty space, it’s creepy creatures instead.

monster head with lots of eyes
I see you! This head is super good for games where number of eyes scores.

Hideous Abomination is an absolute hit with my eight-year-old son. Ever since our first play, I’ve not had the game on my shelves for a second. If we’re not playing the game, he’s making elaborate monsters on the table. There are some blank body-part tiles in the game, and those were pilfered and drawn on in the first day. Any time he sees family members, the game goes with him and they get taught, whether they like it or not. I’ve no idea how many games he’s clocked-up now with various people (and pets), but it’s safe to say it’s his favourite game in my collection.

It’s a great game, and one of those that truly transcends age and generational boundaries. Anyone can play it, and everyone will enjoy it. If you’ve got a family and want to take a step up from those very basic games, and want something with a lot of character from someone who really deserves the recognition, I have no hesitation in recommending Hideous Abomination. It’s monstrously good fun, and you’ll be supporting another indie studio.

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

Hideous Abomination (2020)

Designer: Judson Cowan
Publisher: Tettix Games
Art: Judson Cowan
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15-30 minutes

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Las Vegas Royale Review https://punchboard.co.uk/las-vegas-royale-review/ https://punchboard.co.uk/las-vegas-royale-review/#respond Wed, 01 Jun 2022 17:52:22 +0000 https://punchboard.co.uk/?p=3087 There's something about seeing how far you can push the whims of Lady Luck, in a safe environment, that appeals to pretty much everyone.

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Gambling is at the heart of a lot of popular board games. From the push-your-luck genius of Can’t Stop, through to that stalwart of tabletop flutters, Wits & Wagers. There’s something about seeing how far you can push the whims of Lady Luck, in a safe environment, that appeals to pretty much everyone. Las Vegas Royale is a remake of the 2012 classic, Las Vegas, which adds in some of the elements from the expansion, and gives the whole thing a little spit-and-polish.

It doesn’t take a genius to guess that a game called Las Vegas Royale might have something to do with the gambling center of the world. As a Euro game fan, I’m used to games that have a very thin theme, but the theme on Las Vegas Royale is thinner than a Downing Street party excuse.

Topical humour. Can’t wait to see how that one ages in a few years time.

Dice, dice, baby

The concept behind Las Vegas Royale is so simple, it’s amazing it wasn’t used years before the original Las Vegas game. Each player rolls their handful of dice, picks one of the face-up values, and puts all their dice matching that number onto the casino with the same number. The casinos, in this case, are cardboard tiles around the central dice tray that comes with the game. Each casino has two, randomly chosen, money cards next to them. The person with the most dice in a casino after all the dice are placed, wins the higher value card. Second place gets the lower value card.

las vegas royale in play

Reading that back, it doesn’t sound that exciting. It sounds like Heckmeck with dice. The piece of utter genius that Rüdiger Dorn injected into this game’s lifeblood is what happens with ties. Tied numbers of dice count for nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. The dice just get removed. When that happens it can mean that someone who left a single die their gets the big money, while everyone else is left licking their wounded pride.

That all sounds pretty simple, right? Fun for a round or two, then it goes back on the shelf to gather dust. Wrong. Las Vegas Royale’s simplicity isn’t a weakness, it’s its greatest strength, and it’s why I love the game so much.

Do one thing, and do it well

My wife and son aren’t the biggest board game enthusiasts in the world. The chances of me getting them to even consider playing a heavy Euro or something like that, are non-existent. Although it means I don’t get to play as many games with them as I’d like to, they make for an excellent litmus test. I setup Las Vegas Royale one night, and despite the obligatory eye rolls, we played. Well, slap my ass and call me Susan if they didn’t love it! We immediately played it twice more, and again on the following nights too.

game promo shot

Rüdiger seems to be able to turn his hand to any style of game, at any weight, and he’s sorely under-appreciated. Las Vegas Royale is a perfect example of this. I’ve introduced the game to other, experienced gamers who had never played it, and they’ve loved it too. The mechanisms in the game are so simple to teach, and so easy to understand and interpret. The gameplay is almost entirely emergent, and it’s so fast to come to the surface.

The lack of real theme, and the abstraction of what you’re doing in the game, make it something that literally anyone can enjoy. If you get tired of the main game, there are some neat ways to keep it fresh, too. There are a set of expansion tiles included in the box, which you can add to the lower-value casinos to expand them with new actions, and Vegas-related minigames. In my experience, some of these are better than the others, but there’s nothing to stop you having house rules about which stay in the box.

Final thoughts

Las Vegas Royale deserves a place in everybody’s game collection. If you’ve got family or friends who don’t like “Those complicated games you always try to get us to play”, this is the perfect game to get them playing something different. On the other hand, even the most hardcore of hardcore wargamers need light relief sometimes. Las Vegas Royale delivers this in spades.

I think the biggest problem the game has is with the name and styling. The original Las Vegas had one of the bright and cheery Alea boxes of the time, but this new version is sleek, black and gold, and very different to look at. There’s no immediate connection to the previous game, if you’ve played and enjoyed it and would be keen on an updated version. The other difficulty it faces is the fact that Lords of Vegas exists. Okay, it’s very hard to get hold of, but when you mention ‘dice game’ and Las Vegas in the same sentence, Lords of Vegas is the one you’ll get pointed towards.

These things notwithstanding, Las Vegas Royale is an excellent game. Simple rules, addictive gameplay, and one of those rare games that gets better the more players you have. Playing with three is fun, but playing with five is absolutely brilliant. Lightweight, quick, easy, and pretty much guaranteed to get anybody playing.

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

las vegas royale box art

Las Vegas Royale (2019)

Designer: Rüdiger Dorn
Publisher: Alea / Ravensburger
Art: Antje Stephan, Claus Stephan
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 30-45 mins

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Feature: The Dark Imp https://punchboard.co.uk/feature-the-dark-imp/ https://punchboard.co.uk/feature-the-dark-imp/#respond Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:58:57 +0000 http://punchboard.co.uk/?p=1202 This special feature looks at the games produced by The Dark Imp, and designer Ellie Dix

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The Dark Imp is a British board game developer and publisher, headed up by Ellie Dix. After backing the Cracker Games Kickstarter last year, and watching Ellie on a few live streams, it opened my eyes to some of the games-making talent right under our noses. After a conversation earlier this year, Ellie said she was going to send me some games to try. What I didn’t expect was a HUGE box arriving on my doorstep, with nearly everything they make!

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.

front of coasters
The fronts…

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.

coaster game backs
…and the backs of the Coaster Games we enjoyed the most

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)

beach life placemat game
This is Beach Life. You can immediately see the roll-and-write heritage, and how easy it is to read and play

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.

Castaway placemat game
Castaway is great fun, it even strays into resource management

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.

cracker games cracker and content
There’s an awful lot of stuff crammed into that cracker!

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.

don't count your chickens setup to play
Don’t Count Your Chickens, set-up ready for a three-player game. Rules and animals are all hidden, and that’s where the fun lies

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.

game tins
The tins for Top Cake and Don’t Count Your Chickens

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

doughnut dash box
The Doughnut Dash box

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
Look at how delicious this game looks! It’s bad enough trying to stop kids eating game bits, without me wanting to too

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 box
The Gnome Grown box

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.

ladybird currency
At the risk of sounding like a teenager – oh em gee! The ladybirds (currency) are so cute I could eat them!

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.

gnome grown action selection board
The action selection board

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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