Category: Two player

Planet is all about arranging continents to maximize your objective’s Natural Habitat while hosting as much animal life as possible. There are twelve turns, each with a corresponding pile of face-down Continent tiles and face-up Animal cards. In those twelve turns, players fully develop their Planets, and compete to claim species!

To start, each player gets an empty Planet core and a random Natural Habitat card, which will determine their objective. Each has its own scale for points, depending on how much of that habitat exists on the Continent tiles. Of the five Habitats, oceans are most prevalent, while glaciers are rarest, so the thresholds are higher for someone with an ocean objective to win points. Each turn, that round’s five Continent tiles will be spread face-up on the board, and starting with the First Player, everyone will take one tile and add it to their Planet. To facilitate the 3D aspect of assembling a world, Planet cores are, effectively, blank magnetic d12s, which I think is awesome! The First Player token does pass at the end of the round, so everyone gets an even amount of first picks.

For the first two rounds, there are no Animal cards to compete for. From round three onward, however, after Continents are placed, players compare that Animal’s criteria to see who wins the card. There are a few categories of criteria, and some terminology to explain it: an Area is a single triangle of Habitat, of which each tile has five, while a Region is a contiguous collection of Areas of the same Habitat. In the picture above, for instance, there are two visible ocean Regions, each a single Area in size. For some Animals, this is ideal – they develop on the Planet with the most distinct Regions of a Habitat, regardless of their size. Other animals are drawn to the biggest Region of one kind, which must either be adjacent to or in no way adjacent to another specific Habitat. The Octopus belongs to the largest ocean Region touching mountains, while the Shark requires the largest ocean Region that doesn’t touch mountains. Having both in the same game was interesting.

That’s the other thing about Animals: whereas setup uses all fifty Continent tiles, there are only twenty of the forty-five Animal cards in play, so from game to game your objectives will vary a lot!

When the twelfth turn is over, each player counts how many Areas of their objective Habitat they’ve acquired, and receives the corresponding number of points. Then, they score the Animals! Each animal from the same Natural Habitat as their objective is worth one point, while each animal from another Habitat is worth two. As such, the game becomes a balancing act between collecting your Habitat, and diversifying enough to win the other Animals!

I immediately liked this game. I love the 3D aspect, the spatial puzzle, the challenge of juggling multiple objectives, the animals… we only really had one complaint, which is that the objective cards should have text or symbols (like each Area has, if you look closely at the tiles) so players don’t have to rely so much on color to know what their target Habitat is. We may have mistaken the ocean’s blue for glaciers, the first time, not having seen the white glacier card before. And nobody in our house is colorblind. Aside from that, though, it’s fantastic! I look forward to playing it again.

Some dear friends introduced me to the Mapominoes series of games, which are, aptly named, effectively dominoes but with maps. There are several maps to choose from! We played Africa, Europe, and Asia & Australasia, and since those continents connect, they also have mechanics in place to play them all together. Some of the others, like the UK Counties and US States, probably don’t have the option to interconnect, but the gameplay is entertaining nonetheless.

The whole deck of countries (or states or counties) is split between the players, and each player will get a certain number of transit cards, as dictated by that variant’s rules. On their turns, players place one card, which must border every other card it touches. For instance, Switzerland can go next to Germany, but not Belgium, because Switzerland and Belgium don’t share a border in real life. Because each card only has four sides, and some countries have more or less than four neighbors, the map will very quickly devolve to looking nothing like the real deal.

Some cards share borders with a body of water, i.e. Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean, or France, which borders the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea. Some cards, like Madagascar, only share borders with a body of water. This is where transit cards come in. Transit is a bit like a wild card, able to act as any country or body of water. However, unlike wild cards in other games, the place the transit card is substituting must be declared as it’s played, and every card adjacent to it both then and after must share a border with the place it represents. As a result, you may wind up with multiple cards representing the same location at once – in the photo below, we functionally had two Tanzania cards. This only adds to the chaos of the map. This is also why different continents have players start with a different amount of transit cards – if you’re playing Asia & Australasia, you’re going to have a lot more island nations than if you’re playing Europe.

Transit cards or not, there comes a point when playing your cards is impossible. Perhaps the one open space next to South Africa is boxed in by other cards, and you can’t play Swaziland. Perhaps that space would be open, but you’ve reached the edge of the table, which by the rules of the game is “the edge of the world” and cannot be played past. Regardless, you must instead draw a transit card, and play passes on. When someone manages to play all their country cards, they win!

I’ve already mentioned how chaotic the layout of the resulting map is. There’s also a lot of room for adjusting the game’s difficulty, depending on the space you play it in. On the living room floor? You’re less likely to hit space constraints than if you’re playing on, say, a coffee table. And of course it’s educational! This one’s an all-around win for me.

Food Truck is a simple but challenging game in which you and your opponents all run competing food trucks. It employs a combination of luck and predicting what your opponents are likely to do, as you endeavor to serve meals nobody else is offering yet.

Players start by picking a Food Truck and taking the appropriate deck of five Truck cards. They also start with a deck of one Dessert and five Meal cards, though this number will increase as the game goes on. In the center of the table is a general supply of face-up cards equal to the number of players.

Each round, players will flip over the top card of their Truck deck, and arrange all their Meal and Dessert cards in whatever order they choose to form a draw pile. Then, they’ll take turns turning over the top Meal card of their deck. A few things can happen here: 1) it can be a unique item, that nobody else has played yet. This includes all Desserts, which are wild cards and match with nothing. In this case, it stays in front of them and play passes to the next player. 2) It matches one of their own cards, and adds to that pile. 3) It matches someone else’s card, and the player playing the duplicate is eliminated for the round, taking a card of their choice from the general supply and, if they’re the first person eliminated, the first-player marker. 4) Their top card would match someone else’s card, but they can play their Truck card to somehow circumvent that, whether by rearranging their own deck or affecting someone else’s cards. This is where the pile mechanic becomes important; for two of the five Truck cards, you can use your action if (and only if) the card you’re targeting isn’t part of a pile. Once you use your Truck card, you discard it.

The round ends when all but one player have been eliminated. They claim a victory point and the last card from the supply, any unused Truck cards are discarded (and reshuffled, if all five have now been used), and the general supply is restocked. Once someone has three victory points, they win! Otherwise, Meal decks are arranged and the next round begins.

The result of everyone gaining one new Meal card per turn is that planning your deck becomes progressively harder. Either you have more types of food to strategize with, or you have several of the same types of food, or both, and so does your opponent. Accounting for your Truck ability and whether you’re first-player or not is crucial! So Food Truck is easy to learn, hunger-inducing to look at, and a mental workout to play.

Sloths vs Kraken is, perhaps appropriately, a very quick game. However, the mechanics of the competition aren’t quite what the name implies. Instead, players use Sloth cards to prevent their opponents from spelling the word KRAKEN, while racing to build the word themselves.

Players are dealt six cards. As a result, it’s entirely possible to win on the initial deal, if you happen to start the game with all six letters of KRAKEN. Otherwise, players take turns playing cards, whether those be actions or letters. “Playing” a letter at this stage in the game means discarding one and redrawing. Similarly, any action that takes cards from someone’s hands requires that they immediately redraw, so they continue to have six cards. Any player that has five letters of KRAKEN must yell (or speak at a reasonable volume) “Ahoy!” or else they forfeit their hand and have to draw a new one.

In our case, I started with five of the six necessary letters, reversed someone else’s theft, stole the letter I needed, and won before my first turn. On the one hand, it was a perfect length for the time we had to play it in; on the other, victory relied heavily on luck of the deal. Is that the kind of game you want to play? This, I can’t answer.

Whirling Witchcraft is one of those rare games where the mechanics felt new! You start by taking a board, a cauldron, and one of the two personality cards you draw. The one you pick will have your starting ingredients on the back, which are colored cubes you take from the supply and place on their matching track of your board. There are nine spaces for Mushrooms, Spiders, and Toads, four spaces for Mandrakes, and three for Hearts of Shadow. That’ll be important later.

Some personality cards have recipes, while others have abilities. You’ll also draw a hand of four recipes from the deck. These will let you convert specific ingredients into others, some of which are a one way reaction, and some of which can go either! The personality card in the picture is the Spider Summoner, whose recipe turns three Mandrakes into five Spiders.

All players will pick and reveal the card they’re playing simultaneously. Players will then use the ingredients they have on their workbench to fulfill as many of their recipes as they want. You keep your recipes between rounds, so the further you are into the game, the more options you’ll have! The spent ingredients are returned to the general supply, while those produced are taken from the supply and set in that player’s cauldron. This is important because they aren’t actually going to keep them! Once all the recipes are done those ingredients will be passed to the right, and the next player over will have to place them on their tracks. If they run out of room, the rest of that color goes back to the player it came from, into their scoring circle! The result is what I call “ingredient homeostasis,” where you’re trying to have enough of an ingredient to use in your recipes, but little enough that your workbench doesn’t overflow.

But there’s more! When the cauldrons of ingredients pass to the right, the rest of your cards pass to the left, so you have to balance playing the recipes that help you most with not giving your opponent the ones most likely to hurt you. Some cards also advance your three Arcana tokens on your Arcana card. When the token lands on or passes an even number, you get to trigger its effect! The Potion arcana lets you add one ingredient of any type from the supply into your cauldron, while the Raven lets you remove two cubes from your workbench and the Book lets you pick a type of ingredient, and take all of that ingredient from the supply instead of your board when filling recipes for the turn.

Altogether, it’s an intricate balancing act, done while your friends are trying to trip you and you’re reciprocating in turn. The first person to accrue five cubes in their scoring circle wins! This game goes quickly, so there should be plenty of time to play again and try another character. Plus the boards are pretty!

All 63 of them! Why are you responsible for so many dogs? I have no idea, you’d have to ask the SimplyFun folks who came up with Walk The Dogs!

The game starts with all 63 dogs lined up nose-to-tail in the center of the playing area. That’s a lot of plastic pups, so the line will probably curve a few times, but the important part is that there’s a clear front and back of the line. Once the game has started, players will also have their own lines in front of them, which should also have an obvious direction.

Players start with two cards and draw one, then play one each turn. Most of the cards are Dog cards, which indicate a number of dogs and a side of the line – front, back, or one dog from each. When you play these, you take the indicated number of pups from the appropriate section and add them to your own line, front or back, in any combination. Once your pups are placed, their order is almost always unchangeable, though there are three Leash cards that let you claim a dog from an opponent’s line instead of the general stock. In the end, the goal is to have as many of the same breed in a row as possible!

If anyone gets five matching dogs in a row, they automatically win. Otherwise, the game continues until all the dogs from the middle are taken, and chains score exponentially – one poodle in a row is one point, two make four points, and so forth. The player with the most points wins!

There are also a couple special cards that are played immediately when drawn and replaced. The first is the Bone, which is a three-point bonus awarded to whomever has the least dogs when the card is drawn. Fewer dogs, but happy dogs! The other card is the Dog Catcher, which causes everyone to lose their longest exposed group of same-type pups. (If the front and the back each have chains of equal amount, they get to choose which goes.) All discarded pups go back in the Doggie Bag, never to be seen again. At least, not this game!

While Walk The Dogs is theoretically designed for elementary schoolers, and accordingly easy to learn, the lines’ static nature makes it challenging and fun for strategists of any age.

Which is something my cats might say when the others are trying to steal their lunch, but it’s also the name of a game about penguins! In Hey, That’s My Fish! players compete to collect the most fish while the ice floes shift beneath them.

The board is made up of 1-, 2-, and 3-fish hexagonal tiles, arranged in rows. Players have colonies of 2-4 penguins each, depending on how many people are playing, and take turns placing them on 1-fish tiles until everyone’s penguins are on the board. Then, the game begins! On your turn, pick one of your penguins to move. It can move as far as you want, so long as the movement is in a straight line and the tiles between are vacant. Once you’ve moved your penguin, you remove the tile it started on from the board and add it to your score pile!

The idea is, generally, to land on as many high-value tiles as possible. However, a penguin can’t move through a space where there are no tiles, and once none of a player’s penguins can move, they retire from the game, taking their penguins and the tiles they’re on off the board. So it’s also about not getting stranded in small corners. Or, alternatively, stranding yourself in a nice large chunk of the board, which nobody else can get to, and which you can feast on to your heart’s content. That’s how green won the game pictured above! The game doesn’t end until no one can move, so you don’t have to worry about getting as many valuable tiles as possible before the other players are out; you can have them all.