If you listen closely you can hear the collective rolling of eyes of everyone under the age of 20 as they despair. Regardless, Spots is deserving of the attention and applause it’s garnered so far, and here’s why.

Push it real good

I love push your luck in games. I’m a sucker for it and my games frequently come undone when I convince myself I can beat the odds. If you’re not sure what I mean when I talk about push your luck, go and check out Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop on BGA. Spots tempts the gambler in all of us in a similar way.

Each player starts with a couple of cards in front of them, and each card has a dog with a number of places for you to add dice. The pips on the dice become the spots on the dogs, who presumably all have a bit of Dalmation in them somewhere back in their family trees. Taking a turn is a case of choosing one of the six tiles on the table and doing what it tells you to. Maybe you choose Walk which lets you roll two dice, then if you want to, you can roll another.

All of the dice you roll on each turn have to go somewhere. Preferably on a matching spot on one of your dogs, but if you don’t have a place for them to go, they get buried in your Yard – a little player board beside your cards. If the total of the dice in your yard ever tops 7, you bust, and all of the dice on your unscored dogs get taken off and returned to the supply, forcing you to start again.

You don’t have to take an action though. Instead, you can spend your turn scoring, where you remove the dice from any completed dog cards and flip them over, securing them, and drawing more cards from the draw pile to replace them. It makes sense to do this, after all, six completed dogs wins the game.

Or…

Fast and loose

Spots has a great mechanism which tempts you into going for just one more roll. Instead of taking a turn to score any completed dog cards, you can try taking a risk. If you manage to place dice that finish all of your dog cards at once, without busting, you automatically get to score them all. This game gets really tight towards the end, so not having to spend a turn to score cards gets really tempting. I speak from experience when I tell you that it often doesn’t work out the way you’d hoped.

The first time you play Spots you might feel like it’s very light, that there are very few decisions to make at any given time. Roll as many dice as I can, as safely as I can, and hope they match my dogs, right? Actually there’s more to it than that. I mentioned rolling safely just before, but what constitutes safe? Let’s say you’ve mostly filled your dogs, but you’ve already got a 5-pip buried in your yard. You’re worried about busting and you only want to roll 2s and 3s. Instead of taking an action to roll a bunch of dice, you might spot a dog on top of the deck with 4, 5, and 6 spaces on it. Taking a turn to claim that card (it’s on one of the action tiles) could make your upcoming turns a lot safer.

There are little red bone tokens in the game too. They’re called treats. You can discard a treat to re-roll all of the dice you just rolled, which can get you out of a tricky situation more times than you’d imagine. Likewise, taking a ‘dead turn’ to use one of the actions that gives you treats can benefit you down the line. Making a simple choice like taking these ‘unproductive’ turns adds an unexpected layer of fun to the game. Kids will just have a blast rolling dice and filling in dogs, but those of you who like a bit more in there games will really appreciate moments like these.

Final thoughts

Spots has already become a favourite here at home. It’s quick to learn, packs in tons of variety (there are loads of different action tiles you can mix and match), and it’s stupidly charming. The dogs on the cards (and at least one cow…) are gorgeous, and we spend plenty of time holding cards up saying “Oh look, this one is definitely Jeff”. Jeff’s my pug, by the way.

There’s a big enough decision space to keep players of all levels happy, but even non-gamers will get a kick out of it. It’s really easy to overthink what you’re doing and to find out a child or someone who never plays games has beaten you, and that’s one of Spots’ greatest strengths. It makes you feel clever, no matter what you choose to do, and it provides a much more level playing field for a table of mixed ages and abilities. You can helpfully point out where someone has a safe roll for example, where it’s impossible to bust.

Cute cards, a table full of dice that you’ll end up chucking by the handful, and a game that’s done and off the table in about half an hour. It’s the perfect time-killer, game to play while you’re waiting for a train, meeting someone new at a convention, or starting or closing out games nights. If you can’t stand luck in any form, you might not have a good time here, but if you like pushing your luck and taking a bit of a gamble, you’ll love it to bits, just like I do, frens.

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

Spots (2022)

Design: Alex Hague, Jon Perry, Justin Vickers
Publisher: CMYK
Art: John Bond
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Spots Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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.

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.

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.

Feed & Breed (2024)

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

The post Feed & Breed Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Apparently, the collective noun for penguins is a colony. So in Deep Dive, you control a small colony of penguins. Your goal is to dive into icy waters and return with some tasty submarine morsels. The deeper you go, the tastier (read: more points) the food is worth. However, lurking in the depths there are predators like seals and sharks, and they want nothing more than to p-p-p-p-pickup a penguin.

As if I wasn’t going to get that in there. UK people of a certain age – you’re welcome.

Where you from, you set-sy thing?

In a slight twist from the usual push-your-luck fare, Deep Dive adds set-collection to the mix. It’s not enough to just return with marine munchies. Instead, you want to collect sets of the different colours – pink, green and yellow. If you collect a set, you get the full points from each of the tiles at the end of the game. Any incomplete sets give you half points, rounded down, as if to insult you.

As with games like Can’t Stop, strategy is only a light touch in Deep Dive. Some of it is obvious, like for example prioritising pink tiles when you’ve got lots of yellow and green, but there are some other nice touches in there.

Picking up a rock tile, should you flip one over, can be super handy. In a Did You Know? moment, did you know that penguins eat rocks? A belly full of pebbles – or gastroliths as they’re known – helps a penguin dive deeper. Rocks in Deep Dive do the same thing. Use one at the start of your turn and instead of working your way down through the layers, like eating a big, wet trifle, you can choose to start anywhere. Very handy for trying to nab tiles from the bottom layers.

If you’re worried about penguins being eaten by the predators, then worry not. Your penguins don’t get munched – they’re merely cornered and trapped. Should all three of yours be trapped, you retrieve them all. Trapped Pingus actually act in your favour, because a layer with a trapped one in can just be skipped over. There are a lot of clever little touches in the game which mean that even potentially negative events have some kind of silver lining.

Final thoughts

Deep Dive is extremely cute, and a lot of fun. There’s no denying that it’s very light, and so for most of my readers, it’s a game which will go in your bag as filler material. Sat around a table in a pub, or at a cafe waiting for a train – it’s perfect for these kinds of situations. Will I still be playing it in a couple of years’ time? Time will tell.

It’s a good job that the different depths of water tiles also have a number of dots on the back to tell you which level they belong to because even with my decent eyesight, some of the darker tiles are really hard to tell apart. Other than that, I’ve no complaints about the components at all. The little penguin meeples are to die for.

It doesn’t quite have the same immediate draw that makes me want to play again, and again, like when a game of Can’t Stop ends, but I think some of that is down to the setup time. Don’t get me wrong, it only takes a few minutes, but you really do need to swap out the tiles each time and shuffle new ones into the game, otherwise, you very quickly learn how many predators are on which level, for example. Other than that, Deep Dive is great. Quick, fast, cute, and yours for less than twenty quid. Bargain.

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Deep Dive (2023)

Design: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Flatout Games
Art: Dylan Mangini
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 15-10 mins

The post Deep Dive Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Hit and miss

Cubitos makes heavy use of one of my favourite things in a board game: push-your-luck. I still don’t know why I like it so much, especially when I enjoy heavy Euro games which eschew luck in favour of planning. To move around the track in Cubitos, you throw handfuls of dice. Each die has a mixture of faces with something good on (a hit), and blanks (misses). Any hits you roll are moved to the Active Zone of your area, and then you choose whether to keep rolling with the remainder of your dice, or pass, and get ready to run.

So you and your friends are throwing handfuls of these little dice, banking the good stuff, and then deciding whether to keep going or not. If you roll no hits, you bust! It lends itself to simultaneous rolling, so there’s precious little downtime, but there’s one aspect of the way Cubitos handles it that I really like. There’s nothing in the rules to say you can’t just sit and watch other people rolling, and wait to see if they pass or bust. If you notice someone doing this, you can also stop and wait. In fact, the whole table can, and then it comes down to who has the most available dice, and they must roll first.

I love how it tickles that part of our brains that love to take a chance, to have a little gamble. Whether you find yourself praying to the dice gods, giving your dice a lucky blow, or telling fate that baby needs a new dice tray, I can’t get enough of watching my friends agonise over deciding on one more roll or not. If it sounds like The Quacks of Quedlinberg so far, you’re on the right track. In the same way Quacks has its rat tails catch-up mechanism, Cubitos has a Fan track to advance along, should you bust. It has some great bonuses along it, so it’s never too disheartening if Lady Luck swipes left on you.

Playing the markets

Cubitos also shows its ‘separated at birth’ similarities to Quacks when it comes to improving your pool. In every game, you’ll be buying from the same selection of brightly-coloured dice, but what each of them does is dependent on outside forces. If you’re familiar with Quacks, you’ll remember that each colour’s abilities were decided by which of the spellbooks you use. Cubitos does something similar and gives each of its eight dice stores a choice of seven different ability cards. I’m no Carol Vorderman, but even I know that that adds up to a buttload of different combinations. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

I wouldn’t recommend just drawing cards randomly, however, as you need to strike a balance between cheap and expensive dice, and some just don’t really work with others. It’s a bit like making a sandwich; sure, you could try jam, raw onions and tuna, but there’s no guaranteeing it’ll work. Stick to the recommended setups in the rulebook for your first few games, and enjoy tasty dice sarnies.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about Cubitos so far is that there don’t seem to be any obviously-dominant strategies. In Dominion, the Big Money tactic was famously overpowered for a long time, and it still works even now. Cubitos seems more balanced. The same is true of the different tracks that come in the box. They offer plenty of variety, and just like The Quest for El Dorado which I recently reviewed, you’ll find yourself torn between the shortest route, and the longer, bonus-filled outside lines. I love that no two games ever feel the same. It really does help the game feel fresh for a long time.

The flimsy cardboard elephant in the room

Cubitos comes with a really clever storage solution. Each of the different sets of dice has a storage box included, each of which doubles as a holder/marketplace during the game. Unfortunately, there are two big issues with boxes, both of which wind me up.

Firstly you have to fold and assemble the boxes yourself. This wouldn’t be such a bugbear for me, if it weren’t for the fact that they’ve got some irritating folds. Folds to make some sides recessed – for example. It means you can’t really just punch and sort the game as quickly as you’d want. I’m all for publishers including storage and organisation solutions in their games, even moreso when they forgo plastic in favour of card, so kudos to AEG for that. Just make them simpler, or pre-assembled. It’s really easy to not get straight, crisp folds on your boxes, and they end up looking a bit wonky.

The second gripe I have is using the boxes as the marketplaces, as suggested in the rulebook. It’s a great idea, but the boxes are so top-heavy when using the recesses as trays, that it all feels a bit flimsy. It can be unnecessarily awkward to take dice from the trays when they’re full, especially when you’ve got big, fat sausage fingers like mine.

It’s probably worth noting that I wouldn’t normally complain about a game’s components unless I was really upset about them, and my issue with the boxes doesn’t affect the gameplay at all. The issue is that Cubitos is such a physical, tangible game. Playing with the little dice, rolling them, clacking them together – it’s all a part of the experience. When you regularly have to interact with something which subconsciously detracts from that experience, however little, it’s the sort of thing I have to bring up.

Final thoughts

Look, I know I spend a whole section grumbling about the boxes. Unfortunately, as a dad in his mid-forties, it’s just something I have to do. I’m contractually obligated to be a bit grumpy. Don’t let that make you think Cubitos is anything other than mad fun, because that’s exactly what it is. I love pushing luck in games, I love bag/deck/pool building, and I love social racing games. Cubitos delivers in all three areas, in spades. It’s a brilliant game, and if you like The Quacks of Quedlinburg, you’ll like this too.

The little dice are unbearably cute and tactile. You might be wondering why I’ve mentioned their smaller size a few times in this review, and it’s because size matters – despite what you might have been told. In a game where you’re going to roll at least nine dice (nine!) at the start of your turn, if they were regular-sized dice, you’d need hands like Shaq to hold them all. Not to mention the table space you’d need with four of you all doing it at the same time.

You can play with anything from two to four players, but as with most other racing games, the more the merrier. If you asked me to play a two-player game, I would, but I’d be eyeing your collection to see what else we could play. With four though, I’d bite your hand off. It’s silly, colourful fun, full of groans and cheers, and just like he did with Space Base, John D Clair has come up with a winner. Ignore my curmudgeonly cardboard grumbles, and find out why it was so hard to get hold of for most of last year.

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Cubitos is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Cubitos (2021)

Designer: John D. Clair
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Jacqui Davis, Philip Glofcheskie, Ryan Iler
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Cubitos Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rescuing Robin Hood is a card game. Over five rounds you try to rescue more powerful villagers to add to your crew (deck), and to do this you need to beat the guards that stand in your way. Battle in this game is done by the numbers – that is to say, you’re going to be flexing your big maths brain working things out. There are three traits that every character in the game has: wit, brawn, and stealth. In order to beat a guard, you choose one of the three traits from your current merry band, and then try to remove guards from in front of a villager. That’s where the fun, and the agony of choice, begins.

Feared by the bad

Standing between you and the villagers are a number of the sheriff’s men, but you only get to see the stats of the first guard in each line. The hand you’ve draw for the round determine the strength of each of your traits, and then you decide which you want to use. It’s not as simple as just choosing the strongest, however, as each of them has a different method to take them on.

Choosing brawn means flipping all of the guards in a row face-up, and hoping your brawn level is at least as high as their total, or you fail. Wits lets you push your luck, choosing whether to stop after each card, or risk flipping a further card, risking undoing all of your hard work. It’s a classic Blackjack-style bit of push-your-luck, which I really like. Finally, stealth lets you choose any number of cards – face-up or -down – and hope your total is high enough.

This all sounds very simple, I know, but in practise it’s agonisingly difficult to choose sometimes. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. Thanks to the rulebook, you know the average strength of each of the blue and red guard cards, so you can make a semi-informed decision, but unless every card you attack is face-up, there’s a certain amount of trusting in lady luck. It’s definitely a game to make sure you’re wearing your lucky pants for!

Loved by the good

Rescuing Robin Hood needs collective brainpower and decision making, and it makes for a fantastic co-op game. Before the first player makes a move, you get to chat things over and decide on the best approach. It’s a bit like planning a big heist, but less sexy. Between you, you’ll decide who should do what, where you can afford to take chances, and even use some bonus tokens to do things like reveal more guards, or move them around.

What follows next is great fun. One-by-one everyone takes their turn, and the tension and excitement is great. The three or four seconds of whispered mental arithmetic when totting-up brawn scores, or the tension of whether the wit check will succeed as you slowly turn that last… guard… card…

There’s lots of reactive planning when your plans inevitably tumble all around you, like acorns from Sherwood’s Mighty Oak, and in all honesty, that scramble is great fun. As a Euro gamer, I love it when my plans work just as I’d planned, but the co-operative damage limitation at play in Rescuing Robin Hood is great fun. There’s a real feeling of being all in it together, winning or losing as a team.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood

Rescuing Robin Hood is more a game of deck-construction, rather than deck-building. Rescued villagers are available for players to draft into their decks at the end of each round, gradually increasing the potency of them. You never really cycle through the deck, and at the end of the second and fourth rounds you’re forced to whittle your deck down to eight, and then finally four cards. Card choice is really important. It’s also a tough game. Not difficult to play, the round structure is simple, but succeeding is hard!

In the fifth, and final, round, your team have to storm Nottingham Castle before you can even think about rescuing our favourite outlaw. If you make it as far as rescuing Robin, he joins your team for one last hurrah, trying to take down the Sheriff. Technically, you win as long as you rescue Robin, which is just as well, because accomplishing all three in one round is pretty flipping difficult.

If you’re looking for variety, there’s an advanced game to play, where you additionally draw challenge cards to complete as you play. And if you find yourself short of time, there’s an accelerated version too, to speed things up. My biggest complaint with the game are the boards and cubes used for tracking the values of your traits. They share something with Terraforming Mars, in that they’re wooden cubes on a card with a gloss finish. The slightest bump of the table, or brush with a sleeve, and they make a bid for freedom.

Final thoughts

When you open Rescuing Robin Hood and check out the gorgeous artwork, great rulebook, and custom insert, you’d be forgiven for thinking this comes from an established studio. For a debut game Castillo Games has done an incredible job, both in terms of production, and the game itself. Given how maths-dependent the game’s systems are, it’s clear that a lot of playtesting has happened to get the balance just right.

Fans of perfect information games probably won’t enjoy it too much, as there’s a lot of risk-taking and gambling involved. Rescuing Robin Hood is a proper social experience, and I can see it going down really well at games nights and conventions. The need to talk every step through, and the shared joy and misery when you win and lose, do a great job of binding the players together. If you lose, it’s no single person’s fault, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

The artwork and illustrations are fabulous throughout, and I love the punny names for some of the characters, like Anne Dittover and Hugh Jeego. If you’re planning on buying a game to play with two players mostly, just bear in mind that in my experience, two-player is a much more difficult exercise than with three or four people. Rescuing Robin Hood is a charming, easy-to-learn, co-operative card game, and I’m very impressed. I look forward to seeing what Bryce & Co have in store for us in the future.

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

Rescuing Robin Hood (2021)

Designer: Bryce Brown
Publisher: Castillo Games
Art: Paul Vermeesch
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Rescuing Robin Hood Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Go on then, one more

When it comes to card games, you’re spoilt for choice now. It doesn’t matter if you’re into trick-taking, take-that, set-collection, or even making buildings out of them – there’s something for everyone. Set-collection is one of my favourites, so I was excited to see what Alderac have done with TEN. Yeah, I know, the capitalisation makes it looks like I’m shouting (PARKS did the same thing), but I guess if I had a game published I’d get to choose how it’s written too.

TEN is a simple game at its core. Flip cards over one at a time, with the aim of collecting runs of consecutive numbers in each of the four coloured suits. Each time you flip a card you get the choice of stopping where you are, and claiming either the currency or number cards on show, or carrying on, and flipping another card. If you’re wondering why you wouldn’t just keep flipping cards, it’s because from the first card onward, there’s a running total. If that total ever goes over – you guessed it – ten, you bust.

This is all made more interesting by the currency cards I mentioned. Some of the cards have a number of pips on them, like dice. Currency cards reduce the running total by their value, so you can take the chance of flipping more cards if you can keep that total low enough. If the currency card total goes over ten though, you bust as well. Hmmm, this game is getting pretty tasty, right?

Making a bid

What raises TEN above other games of its ilk, is the inclusion of a market of cards. During the course of the game, various things will cause number cards to get added to the market. If you don’t bust on your turn, you can spend any of your collected currency tokens on buying a card of the same value from the market. Wildcards though, we haven’t touched on wildcards yet, and they add a really nice part to the game – auctions.

Wildcards might be any number of a coloured suit, a number in any colour, or even both at once. You don’t need me to tell you that these cards are really powerful, and so, players get to fight it out for them in an auction. When one is revealed in a turn, everything else stops, and the auction happens. It’s a simple auction, where each player in turn can bid only once, and has to beat the previous highest bid. Wildcards can change the course of a game quite easily, so the auctions can get really interesting.

One of the things I really like about TEN is that there’s no such thing as a bad turn. If you’re used to games like Can’t Stop, where pushing your luck too far can result in a dead turn with no reward, this is a refreshing change. It keeps the game really tense, with no runaway leader, or worse, someone who stands no chance of catching up. If the worst happens and you bust, you get a token worth three currency, which can be really powerful in future auctions.

Final thoughts

If it isn’t already obvious, I really like TEN. Set collection is awesome, push-your-luck is awesome, so what’s not to like? It plays nicely with all counts from two to five, but four or five is where I like it best, because the auctions take on some real bite. The game ticks along at a nice rate, and you can happily play three games in an hour. One thing I love about TEN is that all players are invested in every turn, not just their own. If someone chooses to take numbers, all other players get the currency left on the table. There’s palpable tension when someone’s sitting on a total of seven and choose to flip another card. Will they bust….?

The production values, especially considering it’s a card game, need to be talked about. TEN is gorgeous. The card quality is really good, the colours are vibrant, and there are so many nice touches throughout. The shiny UV spots on the cards not only look nice, but if you look closely you’ll notice there are a number of spots on each card that equal the value of it. The currency tokens are really tactile too, it’s fun just to play with them and clack them in your hands between turns.

Molly, Robert and Shawn from Flatout Games have put together a really polished game, one which I would – and have – play at home or a convention alike. The box is small enough to take to the pub, and when you consider you can pick it up for under £20, it’s the kind of game you could, and should, play anywhere. Tense, fast, and it’ll get the table talking, TEN is superb.

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

TEN (2021)

Designers: Molly Johnson, Shawn Stankewich, Robert Melvin
Art: Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post TEN Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of push-your-luck in games. If it’s used well, it creates so much drama and interaction around the game table, and Sheepy TIme uses it really well. One of my favourite games of recent years is The Quacks of Quedlinburg, because it balances risk and reward so nicely. Sheepy Time does something similar, but in a different way, and I think I might even prefer it.

Getting forty winks

Gameplay in Sheepy Time is really simple, and very easy to teach and learn. On your turn you play one of the two cards in your hand, and do one (or sometimes both) of the actions on it. These actions almost always allow you to move a certain number of spaces around the board, or to place your Zzz tokens on one of the Dream Tiles, but more on that in a bit.

Every time you move enough spaces to jump the fence, you claim the five Winks (victory points) then make the decision whether to keep going and try for one more lap, or to call it a night, and cash out with the points you’ve accumulated that round. If you’re wondering what your incentive is to call it a night, there’s a nightmare piece moving around the board too.

There are a number of nightmare cards shuffled into the draw deck, and every time one is drawn you immediately carry out the actions, which typically move them a number of spaces around. If the nightmare jumps the fence before you call it a night, you lose your points for that round. Knowing when to call it quits and when to push your luck, is a tricky choice to make. And that’s where the magic of Sheepy Time comes from.

In it together

As much as I enjoy Quacks, there’s a small issue that detracts from the experience for me. It’s a very insular game: you build your bag, pull your ingredients, make your potion. The only time you have to all look at the same place and come together mentally, is when you do the round-end scoring. Sheepy Time does something really nice in having one central board for all the players, and it turns the experience into a really communal one.

There’s a common enemy in the nightmare, and you’re all playing on the same board, with the same dream tiles, and the forced end of the round is the same for everyone. You can all see the scoreboard and see how close someone is to winning, and that adds some brilliant drama and tension. Knowing that you need one more hop of the fence to win, and that everyone else has already called it a night. Knowing that the nightmare has already scared you (meaning landing in the same space as it once more ends your round), and is only one space away from jumping the fence – that kind of tension is amazing.

Too excited to sleep

We’ve played games of Sheepy Time where it’s come down to the wire, and the sheer drama of every card draw, and seeing whether a nightmare card comes off the top of the deck – it’s palpable. Each draw is greeted with gasps of agony and relief. For the strategists among you, that might sound like a nightmare (oops), but if you enjoy a game that’s about the people around the table and the shared experience, it’s amazing.

To keep the game fresh there are the aforementioned Dream Tiles. After each round these can be added to the spaces around the board. If you land on one and have a Zzz tile on it, you can use its ability, such as moving extra spaces, moving the other sheep, or even getting a few extra points. Clever placement of them can even let you combo bonuses one after the other, which feels great.

There are three different nightmare opponents in the box, who all behave differently, and add some freshness if things ever feel stale.

Final thoughts

When I first saw Sheepy Time, I wasn’t particularly enthused. I’m guilty of thinking it looked like a simple kid-friendly game. I’m so glad I was given the chance to play it, and to give myself a kick up the backside to make sure I don’t fall foul to preconceptions. Zoé Plane’s artwork is simultaneously cute and creepy, and I hope I see her art in future games. It fits the theme so well.

My comparisons to The Quacks of Quedlinburg are valid in my opinion, as they both do push-your-luck so nicely. Sheepy Time just does it in a different way. Instead of the personal investment in your own little bag of ingredients in Quacks, you’ve got this shared board, this arena, where everyone can see what’s going on at all times, and everyone knows what they’ve got to do in order to win.

Just because it didn’t arrive with the same fanfare as a lot of games have this year, doesn’t detract from the game you’ll get for your ~£30. If your family or group enjoy balancing risk and reward, it’s a great choice. Even when you lose, the stories you tell afterwards about that time someone pipped you on the last turn of the game, are the same stories that’ll see you playing the game again and again. Sheepy Time is a sleeper hit, and I don’t really have a baaaaad word to say about it.

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Sheepy Time (2021)

Designer: Neil Kimball
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Zoé Plane
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Sheepy Time Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Quacks, from designer Wolfgang Warsch, is a mixture of two well-matched game mechanisms: bag-building and push-your-luck. You’re trying to pull as many ingredients from your bag in each round, and place them on your cauldron board without making the value of any white tokens exceed 7. At the end of the round, you’re rewarded with victory points and money to spend, based on how much stuff you managed to throw into your potion. Go over 7 though, and boom! The cauldron explodes, and you’re forced to choose either VPs or money, not both.

Playing the odds

Quacks is a game of chance. You start the game with a number of tokens – including the dreaded white ones – in your slinky bag, and as you pull more of them out, there’s a quick bit of mental arithmetic and odds calculation. For example – you might already have white ingredients in your cauldron with a total value of 5. You know you’ve got another in your bag that’s worth 2, and one that’s worth 3. Remember, 8 or more = kaboom! You remember you’ve also got another four safe colour tokens in there. So now you know there’s a 1-in-3 chance of grabbing a white one, and a 1-in-6 chance that you’ll end up with potion on your face. So, the question is, do you feel lucky, punk? Do ya?

That example might not make for the most stimulating reading, granted, but it’s the kind of internal dilemmas you’ll be facing every single round.

That’s where the whole game of Quacks lives, in those risky decisions, and it’s what makes it so much fun. Hearing the laments of your opponents as they pull white after white from their bag, while your rooty brew hasn’t had even one so far. The gasp of relief when someone goes for one more token that they know damn well they shouldn’t go for, and survives. It’s a real social experience, and one that’s a lot of fun. It’s one of those games that works just as well with your family as it does with a group of friends.

The best game I can think to compare Quacks to, is Blackjack, or Pontoon depending on where you grew up. The game where you’re trying to draw cards to get close to – but not over – 21. Obviously there’s a lot more going on in Quacks, but the feeling is remarkably similar. Quacks is wonderfully balanced, and there’s a great catch-up mechanism which relies on rats’ tails on the VP track to give temporary boosts to the losing players

Keeping things fresh

When you earn money at the end of a round, you spend it on new ingredients for your bag. The mathematicians among you will already have figured out that the more tokens you add, the lower the probability of pulling out a white one each time. The more you spend, then generally the more a token is worth, and the further it moves you around your cauldron’s spiral, increasing the rewards. Each colour of token has an opportunity of bonus scoring too, based on the ingredient books you’ve chosen for the game. Those ingredient books are great, they really change the game up and stop it getting stale too quickly.

Each round introduces a new fortune teller card too, which might change the rules just enough to make you re-think your strategy this time around. I say ‘strategy’, but most of the time strategy goes right out the window. Pure gut feeling tells you that this next token in your hand, this is the one, this is the one that gets you victory, this is the one that gives you loads of money, and – crap! It’s another white one.

There’s plenty to keep the game fresh. There are four sets of ingredient books which define the bonuses for each colour, and they’re double-sided and can be mixed and matched. The player boards too, can be flipped to reveal an advanced side, which adds in some more constraints. If, after that, you still want to add more to the game, there are a couple of expansions you can buy. First came The Herb Witches, but today I’m going to take a look at the latest one – The Alchemists.

Expansion – The Alchemists

In The Alchemists you’re tasked with trying to cure patients with some very unusual complaints. Everything from forgetfulness to having an actual carrot for a nose. The Alchemists adds an extra add-on player board for each person (including the 5th player if you have the Herb Witches expansion). The new boards have a flask, a series of vials, and a new tracking token. There’s also a new ingredient to add to your concoctions – locoweed.

The idea of the expansion is to reward having a good mix of ingredients in your bag and cauldron. In the base game you might choose to just concentrate on one colour, to try to maximise the bonuses from it. In The Alchemists however, after the end of the preparation phase, when everyone has finished mixing their brews, you move your new marker up the new track based on the number of different colours in your potion. You also get rewarded if your neighbours push their luck too far and explode their potions. It means pushing your luck too far is even riskier now, as you could end up directly benefitting your rivals

Final Thoughts – Quacks of Quedlinburg

I love push-your-luck games. Can’t Stop is my most-played game on boardgamearena. Quacks appeals to that part of our brains that gets stimulated by gambling. If you know the odds say you’re going to pull out another white token which blows your potion to smithereens, but you do it anyway and get away with it.. that’s a feeling that’s as amazing for you as it is infuriating for the other players. The mixture of luck and strategy is really enjoyable to me. I know which ingredients are in my bag, I know how well I can score if I pull them out, and I know the probability of pulling them out. That doesn’t mean I will however, and it’s that random chance which makes the game so much fun.

The Quacks of Quedlinburg is really simple to teach. Anyone can pick up the basics inside the first round they play. That’s great, because it means it’s a big-box game that I can pull off the shelf and know my son will be able to play with me, and more importantly, he wants to play it with me. For a game where your focus is so insular, it’s surprising how vocal and social the game becomes. You don’t care what’s happening in the other players’ cauldrons, as there’s no way for them to block you or influence your turn, but mark my words, you’ll be keeping an eye on what’s going on.

The shouts of disbelief when someone survives a risky extra pull, and the cursing of your chosen deity when you pull out white, after white, after white. It’s such a fun experience, and it’s one of those special games that lives on after the game. You’ll be talking to your friends about games long after you played them. “Hey, remember that time when you blew up your pot in the last round, even though you had a bag full of amazing tokens? Or what about the time I managed to get away with that one last ingredient which won the game?”. It’s moments like that which make board games special, and Quacks is packed with them.

If pure strategy is your thing and you hate luck, this might not be for you, but for the rest of us The Quacks of Quedlinburg is a brilliant game, and one I think belongs in everyone’s collection.

Final Thoughts – The Alchemists

I’m a bit of an oddity, as I’ve gone straight to The Alchemists without having played the Herb Witches expansion. But taken on its own merits, The Alchemists is an excellent addition to the base game. My usual turn-off with expansions is when they add a whole new layer of complexity on top of a game I’ve already taught. The Alchemists doesn’t do this, you don’t have to change the way you play the game at all. All of the additions happen after the normal preparation phase of the game, which is unchanged.

I really like what it does, and the way it does it. You could safely add The Alchemists after just a couple of plays without frightening anyone off, and if anyone doesn’t feel confident in engaging with the expansion, they can just play along while pretty much ignoring the new board, and still get rewards from it. Plus, the table looks gorgeous with the extra glassware and colour. It’s cheap, and it adds a lot to the longevity of the game without complicating it. It’s a very easy recommendation from me, if you enjoy the base game of Quacks.

A review copy of The Alchemists was kindly provided by Coiledspring Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018)

Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
Publisher: Schmidt Spiele
Art: Dennis Lohausen, Wolfgang Warsch
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The Alchemists – (2020)

Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
Publisher: Schmidt Spiele
Art: Oliver Schlemmer
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post The Quacks of Quedlinburg + The Alchemists Review appeared first on Punchboard.