With only 16 cards and some loot cubes, Munchkin Loot Letter is quick and compact, featuring familiar cards from Munchkin and mechanics reminiscent of Knuckle Sammich. It’s a simple “draw one, play one,” with a hand size of one, leaving you choosing between two cards each turn. Each card has a value and an effect – the goal is to be either the last player standing, or the one with the highest value card when the deck runs out!
Effects come in a few different flavors, mostly ways to eliminate other players depending on what’s in their hand. By far the most common card is the Potted Plant, a 1-value card that lets you make a guess at what someone else is holding. If you’re right, they’re out! (You cannot, however, guess Potted Plant.) The higher value cards are deliberately inconvenient, meanwhile, like the Turbonium Dragon which must be discarded if you ever have the Net Troll or Dread Gazebo in hand. For a tiny, tiny deck, it’s impressively well-balanced! You’re meant to play multiple rounds, best-of fashion, with the loot cubes to keep track of who’s winning.
I would loosely describe Thud as asymmetric chess – an all-strategy game for two players, but in which each player is operating off of different rules. It’s based on a battle in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld featuring a smaller force of larger opponents, and a larger force of smaller ones.
Due to sheer size, the Trolls (the larger characters) both move more slowly and need only land adjacent to a Dwarf to capture it. Dwarves, on the other hand, zip about the map much like chess’s queens – but they can only capture if enough of them have lined up to fling the front Dwarf into the nearest opponent. Who must be directly in line with them. It’s rather challenging.
To the rules’ credit, they warn you that the Trolls are much easier to play, and the Dwarves take some getting used to. Also to their credit, the game is played in two rounds, so each player gets to play both sides – overall victory is scored not so much by who won, but by who lost less. If you fielded the Trolls’ jump-‘n-thump and their shove propulsion – their version of flinging a friend – enough to actually capture any of them, you’re doing pretty well. Presumably, it’s possible with enough practice for the Dwarves to present a serious challenge.
Ultimately, we decided this game wasn’t for us, and I hope our copy finds someone who cherishes it and enjoys the puzzle it presents.
I have to tell you, looking up whether I’d already blogged this one was substantially more difficult than I expected – apparently there’s a lot of posts with “wild” and “side” in some combination or another! Today, however, I’m specifically talking about Wild Side, a dice game that actually takes a decent amount of precision!
Rather than the behavior of the players, “Wild Side” refers to the “Wild” side of the dice, which is a crucial part of gameplay. This is, in essence, a speed matching game – all players roll at the same time, and if any players match both a Wild side andsomething else, the first to slap the card in the middle steals a die from the other. Multiplayer is uncomplicated by only scoring one match per roll, no matter how many are possible – excepting multiple matches with the same person – and all-Wild matches with anything, while your last die has to match with everyone. More overarchingly important, however, is that the rolling is targeted: you have a designated square of felt your dice have to land on, or you can’t benefit this turn! You can match – that is, other people can match with you – but you can’t cash in your match with anyone else. Additionally, false positives are penalized, with the gun-jumper sacrificing a die to the middle. The next person to actually match gets that die too!
All of this comes together to form a game that’s surprisingly difficult, balancing precision, speed, and perception in the struggle to steal your neighbors’ dice. As one does. The game ends when someone runs out of dice to lose, and whoever has the most wins!
I was perusing the game library at a convention recently and happened to stumble upon Seikatsu, a gorgeous gardening game that makes excellent use of perspective!
All players share the same garden, enhancing the view from their color-coded pagodas by populating it with bird/flower combos, scoring points for matching adjacent birds as they do. Once the garden is full, they score again, this time for flowers! Flowers are scored in rows instead of clusters, still by type, and the rows are determined by the perspective of each player’s pagoda. I adore this mechanic – the use of shared space combined with directional scoring parameters? The dance of scoring points now and later for yourself, without also helping your opponents? Absolutely fascinating. And the koi of course can pair with anything.
It occurred to me abruptly that while I have referenced Mancala on this blog, I’ve never properly posted about it! And that seemed like a shame.
Like chess, Mancala is a long-time-played, all-strategy, two-player board game that comes in many forms. The set we were playing with used stones as the pieces, and had a wooden board with two rows of six circular indents, with an oval at each end. This version of mancala is fairly straightforward – each circle starts with the same amount of stones, and players take stones from their own side of the board, trying ultimately to score them in that side’s oval.
When a player takes stones from one of their circles, they’ll move counter-clockwise, dropping a stone in the next pit, then the next, and so forth, until they’ve placed them all. This includes their own oval, but skips over their opponent’s; all other opponents’ spaces are counted. If the last stone they place is in their scoring space, they take another turn; if not, their opponent goes. There’s also a special “capturing” mechanic, which I’ve seen two sets of rules for. In both, ending your turn in an empty circle lets you score all stones in the pit across from it, a space your opponent controls. What the rules disagree on is whether you also score the stone you just placed! This is a consequence of Mancala dating back to at least the 3rd century, gaining variance as it aged and spread geographically. This also means there are much more complicated variants I hope to someday try!
I suspect, however, that we’ll have the same problem with all forms of Mancala as we had with this one: Zuko was trying to help… by stealing the stones.
This is one of those games that’s very simple – good for younglings or intense multitaskers. Feed the Kitty involves dice, mice, and a bowl. And that’s it!
Players take turns rolling dice, which will make them put mice in the bowl, take mice from the bowl, or give mice to another player. You only get to roll if you have mice in front of you, and you’re still in even if you don’t – there’s always the chance someone has to pass you some! Unless it’s a two-player game, in which case the end-of-game condition – when all but one player are out – is immediate. Sorry. The player who still has mice is the winner.
There is, of course, a fourth option on the dice: take a cat nap! Perhaps my favorite “no action” gimmick to date.
There are games that are rewardingly difficult, even educational (like Wingspan!), and there are games that are simple and hilarious. Monster Factory is one of the latter.
You’re building monsters. Like Dizios, you’re aligning like sides to like, only in this case it’s much more straightforward: there are purple/wide sides, and green/narrow ones. You draw one tile at a time and play it immediately on any player’s monster, provided it fits. It only gets discarded if there’s nowhere to put it! A completed monster is, of course, one with nowhere for new tiles to go. If all monsters are completed, the game ends; otherwise, the player immediately draws a tile as the base for a minion. When the game ends – which can also be caused by tiles running out – all completed monsters and minions are scored, monsters for total number of tiles and minions for tiles with eyes on them. What you want, then, is to build as large a monster as you can without running out of time.
And that’s it! That’s all the mechanics in one paragraph. Like I said: simple. The important part of this game is how fantastically ridiculous the pieces are, both on their own and compounded. One of our favorites is the green appendage holding a little screaming person! Which really sets the tone, don’t you think?
It’s always a delight when a game can multitask! Wingspan is one of those strategy games with lots of moving parts and several ways to earn points. We’ve played it four times now and I haven’t used the same strategy twice! It’s also an educational deep-dive into the birds of North America.
It’s essential that the core mechanics are simple – everything else is as complicated as you let it be, and as informational as you let it be, but the actual pattern all play follows is pretty straightforward! Each player has little colored cubes and a player board. Each turn, there are four actions available to them. The first is to play a bird in the leftmost open space in one of their three habitats, marking the column with a cube. After the first column, playing birds costs eggs.
The other three actions are specific to those habitats. In each case, your cube starts in the rightmost open space of the habitat, on the habitat’s ability itself, and then moves left, giving you the choice of activating each bird it passes over, provided they have a “When Activated” ability. (Also possible are “When Played” and “Once Between Turns.”) The habitats themselves are the forest, which lets you gain food – necessary to play most birds – from the birdfeeder; the grasslands, which let your birds lay eggs; and the wetlands, which let you draw more bird cards. A round is over when all cubes have been placed, and one is then used to mark end-of-round scoring. The result is that your number of actions each round goes down as the number of things each action does goes up. The game has four rounds. Scoring is a tally of the point values of your birds themselves, end-of-round goals, bonus cards (you pick one at the beginning of the game and can draw more later), eggs, food on cards (bird ability), and tucked cards (also a bird ability). Like I said – many ways to earn points!
And then, of course, there’s the technical aspects. The educational aspects. The part I’m nerding out over the most. Including the swift-start, the cards cover 180 North American bird species, including: their common names, Latin names, their habitats, what they eat, the continents they live on, nest type, wingspan, and how many eggs they lay in a year – that last one was brought down to scale. Some of these are just neat – continents, Latin names – and some are mechanically relevant! Various cards and end-of-round goals are dependent on nest type, or number of eggs in a particular nest type. (There’s a wild type that counts as everything, and in reality they have non-standard nesting habits. Like black terns, which apparently nest on water.) How many eggs the species naturally lays determines the limit for how many they can have in the game. Wingspan is relevant specifically when certain predatory birds are preying on the top card of the deck – if it’s below a certain wingspan, it’s edible. There is so much love and care and research permeating every inch of this game; it’s palpable and contagious. I expect the same is true of the expansions, too, which feature other continents! Someday…
The third and final game in the series! Unlike Cat Days and Woof Days, I can only speculate on the behavioral accuracy of this one. Still, Dino Days features a fun variety of the creatures in question with, like the others, a mix of new and familiar mechanics. (As this is a comparison post, I would highly recommend reading the other posts first! At minimum, the one on Cat Days, where I explained the overall mechanics of the game.)
The most immediately obvious difference is in your starting hand. Like in Cat Days, there’s a fixed card all players start with, and unlike in Cat Days, this card is an animal worth points all on its own. Quite a lot of them, in fact! The catch? Giganotosaurus’s superpower is scaring away all other dinos on the board you’ve played it on, so you need to decide quickly whether you’re using it to garner points or holding it to wield against your opponent.
There are other dinos with similar, though less all-encompassing, predator abilities, and of course some non-dino cards as well. Another major difference with this deck is the Diplodocus: a dino that’s split across Diplodocus Front and Diplodocus Rear cards, which you must have both of to play – spanning two adjacent days of the week, counting as one action, and, if it’s still around at the end of the game, scoring its player twelve points. A tricky set of conditions, sweetened by another factor: many of the dino-removing or -stealing effects can’t touch it. Which in turn makes the Meteor a coveted prize, as one of the few exceptions!
And of course, there are your staples like the Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Ankylosaurus, with much chiller day-of-the-week effects. Triceratops being Sunday-only, for example. True to form, the dinosaur game is one of carnivores and herbivores, functionally distinct from those of Cat Trees and Muddy Paws. Which is what excited me most about this as a set, I think – not only do you pick the flavor text, you get to pick the tone!
I suppose “Dog Days” was disqualified for connotations. That’s alright – I think “Woof Days” is cuter! From the same people who made Cat Days, Woof Days is… well, the dog version. Admittedly, I know far less about dog behavior, so I can only hope it’s as spot-on as the cat game. I’d expect that it is. The contrast between the games is especially interesting! (That’s mostly what I’ll be discussing here, so reading the Cat Days post first would be beneficial.)
Instead of starting with four random cards and a Cat Tree or equivalent, players start this game with five random cards, making your opponent’s opening moves even more unpredictable. Whereas Cat Days cards tend to affect the top card of a pile, many movement effects in Woof Days move the whole stack as a unit, which in retrospect highlighted for me the mix ‘n match behavior of cats and who they choose to hang out with. Some of the animal cards correlate pretty directly – the Rescued Cat and the Mixed Breed have the same effect – while others are distinct. The Chihuahua, for instance, must be played on a day that’s not adjacent to a Great Dane, German Shepherd, or St. Bernard.
Overall, it’s sort of like Fluxx variants: you expect the overall mechanics to be the same, in new flavors. And there’s one more flavor to discuss, so I expect I’ll be posting about that next week!
