It’s been a long week, so here’s a picture of Arwen and a hint of what’s to come!
Teaser
Month: January 2024
Ready to Stack Some Penguins?
There’s a kids game with exactly that premise: Penguin! Yep, just Penguin. And it’s easy to learn, as evidenced by the single double-sided sheet of rules.
The even shorter version? Players blindly draw penguins and hide them behind their screen, so only they can see. Everyone takes turns placing a single penguin in play, either next to one that’s already there, or balanced between two, matching the color of at least one of them. Usually the bottom row has a max of eight penguins, but we were playing two-player, so it was seven. A player is out when they can’t play another figure. The round is over when everyone is out.
Now, you’ve heard of highest score, you’ve heard of lowest score, but get ready for: least negative score! That’s right, players score penalties for each penguin they couldn’t place. They also incur a hefty penalty if they knock over the iceberg, but since we were making full use of the wings (slots for the base of penguins above, holding them steady) we didn’t exactly have that problem.
Play until you’ve had as many rounds as you have players, and then award whomever has the least penalties “Monarch of Penguin Stacking”! (That’s not an official part of the game, but you could.)
This one’s really simple, so it may be under-stimulating for an all-adult group, but I imagine it’s good for little ones, and especially for encouraging them to be gentle with piece placement. That, and there is a little strategy in the form of cutting off different color paths, or trying not to.
Time to Go on a Greed Quest!
Sometimes you’re going through the game cabinet, and you realize only one member of the household actually remembers a game (that came out before the other one was born). So, naturally, you have to play it again! For us, (this time,) that game was Greed Quest.
Greed Quest is a competitive dungeon crawl put out by Steve Jackson Games way back in 2004. The overarching mechanics are fairly simple: everyone starts in the first room, going the same way, with their own deck of cards, of which they’ll each play one simultaneously every round. Easy. And somehow still so much chaos.
First off, each of the 12 rooms has a special effect, ranging from the relatively benign (“You may choose whether to keep or discard the first card you draw each turn,” or the one room without an effect) to the challenging – like the room where you can’t draw to refill your hand, and if you can’t get out before your hand empties, you move forward anyways but lose your next turn. Secondly, the cards themselves. Even simple movement is… less simple. Go! cards are a competition, with only the highest value played actually granting movement. Unless someone else played The Meek Shall Inherit, in which case whoever played the lowest value Go! card moves. Note that cards like this don’t directly benefit you, since you’re only playing one card per turn. They just mess with everyone else. I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that this game comes from the same company as Munchkin.
Third, once you reach The Horde! at the end of the path, you then have to turn around and make it back to the beginning! Which means those cards that grant movement based on where other players are get nice and tricky. Like the Odd Reversal in the photo – “If the winning Go! card is odd, trade rooms with that player after he moves.” The friend who ultimately won this game won because they – previously in room nine, when we were all on the return – swapped places with someone in room three! And as they made it back to room one, the person they’d booted to room nine swapped with someone else in room three. Oh, and room nine is the one where the deck picks your card for you! In short, it’s very much one of those “no lead guarantees victory” games. Chaotic from start to finish!
Come to the Arboretum!
Arboretum is a gorgeous tree-based strategy game that I tried at a friend’s house this week… and completely forgot to take pictures of. Whoops. The basis of the game is that you’re building an arboretum and, eventually, scoring your trees. Or rather… some of them.
Each player starts with seven cards in hand, which will be a constant. On your turn, you’ll draw two cards, play one, and discard another. Each player has their own face-up discard pile, which is important because cards can be drawn from the top of the deck, but also the top of any discard!
Except for your first card, everything played has to be orthogonally adjacent to a tree already in your arboretum. Everyone has their own, so your played cards don’t directly affect each other, but may affect what cards you choose to pick up. More on that later. The goal, ultimately, is to make paths. A path is any set of trees of ascending value that start and end with the same species. (So long as you can draw a line between them, it can be as twisty as you want.) The trees in the middle can be something else, and they can skip numbers, but you get a bonus point for paths that start with a 1, and two for paths that end with an 8! You also get extra points if your path is at least 4 trees long and all the same species.
Your strategy, then, may be informed by what other players are playing, to block advantageous moves. However. There’s another element to scoring. Only one player has the right to score each species! Who is determined by the cards in your hand when the deck runs out. Whoever has the highest sum value of that species in their hand gets to score it – ties are friendly, and if nobody has it then everyone can score. This means you might pick up other players’ favored trees, to prevent them from scoring, but you also need enough of your best types in hand to actually reap the benefits of your work.
Between the spatial logic, planning ahead, ever-shifting discard selection, and scoring intricacies, Arboretum is a deceptively challenging mental exercise hidden behind calming, beautiful art.
