Author: Cassandra

Cowabunga is a saying, yes, and also a cattle-themed surfing card game. The goal is simple – to wipe out the least!

The execution is more difficult, and requires a combination of luck, memory, and mental math. The whole game revolves, unsurprisingly, around a wave, the height of which is altered by player actions. Each turn, you’ll play a Wave Card, adding to the wave height when the wave is rising, and subtracting when it falls. But be careful! There are also Obstacle Cards, numbered ten through thirty, and if the sum (or difference) of your play equals an opponent’s Obstacle, you wipe out! You’re not out of a game, but you do have to take a Cow Pawn.

That said, you do have one advantage – you get to see the Obstacle Cards when your opponents first draw them. You then have to remember which numbers they are, and hope your Wave Cards grant you the option of avoiding them. This is further complicated as the game goes on, because whenever someone takes the wave to higher than thirty, or lower than ten, not only does the direction flip, but the player to their right draws another Obstacle. In other words, if you’re the one to cross that threshold, the surf just got more hazardous for you.

Especially in a two-player game, you can reach a truly impressive number of Obstacles to remember. I think I had to avoid twelve numbers, the last time we played. Regardless of the number of players, the game ends when someone reaches four Cow Pawns or the last Obstacle Card is drawn. And as I said earlier, the player who wiped out the least wins!

We first played Flyin’ Goblin back in January, the day it was gifted to Mom, and we’ve played it many times since. This is mainly because there are catapults involved.

Yes, you heard that right. Catapults! The “Flyin'” part of Flyin’ Goblin is quite literal; gameplay involves launching your Goblin meeples into the castle so they can pillage the Rooms they land in. Coins are used to recruit more to the cause, be they more soldiers to fling, the Captain, to fling with doubled effects, or Robbers, who chill on Roofs and burgle a Diamond a turn. Diamonds are one of the victory conditions; your other option is to build all tiers of the Totem without your opponents knocking it down. (The Totem also sits on a rooftop, and costs Coins to build.)

The actual catapulting is a mix of accuracy and speed – you want to land in specific Rooms, certainly, but you also want to launch all your Goblins! Everyone starts this step at the same time, and continue at their own pace until all but one player have called out “Finished!” The last player then gets one more launch.

Alongside resource Rooms, there are a couple that have penalties, and several that simply have effects. Whether they’re good or bad depends entirely on what you were looking for! They are not, however, optional. If you land in the Pantry and you have two Coins, you must trade them for two Diamonds.

The “honeypot” of the arrangement is the King’s Bedchambers, which give you three Diamonds for landing there. If you gained the Balcony by knocking the King off it (not visible in my pictures, as the King has already been displaced and given his consolation prize of a lower Roof; at the beginning of the game, the Balcony balances over the top of his Bedchambers) you get five instead! Knocking the King down from his lower Roof will also gain you the Balcony, later in the game, but now you’re just bullying the poor guy.

If you’re not familiar with the serotonin rush of flinging little game pieces at the board for points, I highly recommend it. Good for the soul. Try not to hit the other players, though!

Scarf-N-Barf is a vomit-humored game from Steve Jackson Games, and both very simple and very quick. It’s exactly what it says on the tin; you’re going to (in card game manner, thankfully) eat lots of junk food, then go on crazy rides and try not to hurl.

For breakfast, lunch, and dinner each – you’ve spent all day doing this, vomit not deterring you – you’ll pick three of the six cards you’ve been dealt, representing the food you eat. Some of these sound really good: Cheese Curds! Some do not, like the Chowder Pop. All foods have a color-number combo associated with them; the more points its worth, the more of these criteria they have. After everyone has picked their meals, three Rides are dealt (with names like “Tilt-A-Hurl” and “Hork-A-Tron”) which all players will suffer together. One Ride at a time, the corresponding color dice will be rolled, and any food items that match both the color of the die and the number rolled are lost; you throw up straight into the discard. Any foods that survive all three Rides are successfully digested. At the end of the day, the player who’s retained the highest point value wins!

This is one of those games that’s about luck in a variety of ways. The cards you’re given. The dice indicated by the Ride cards. The way you actually roll. Doubles on your cards are a pain; doubles on your dice are a gift. There are several ways to strategize and none of them are guaranteed to work. The chaos is palpable. And your actual stomach’s contents are safe, unless the concept (or the cards) makes you queasy.

That’s right! The cat, the myth, the legend: Purrrlock Holmes! Purrrlock Holmes: Furriarty’s Trail is, you’ll surely have deduced, a deductive reasoning game. The goal is to work together to catch Furriarty before he can escape London, while simultaneously competing to be the best Inspector!

It comes down to a lot of smaller cases, like pulling threads. Each player has an Investigation, stood facing away from them so only their opponents can see. This card, like all the rest, features one of five characters, and one of twelve times. The goal is to guess one or both correctly. Not without evidence, of course! Each turn, you’ll Investigate two cards from your hand, revealing them to the other players, who will tell you if each is a Lead or Dead End. A Lead is a card that has the same Suspect, same Hour, or an adjacent Hour to your Investigation. You also draw and Investigate two cards when you draw a new Investigation, so you always have something to work with!

You may guess once per turn; if you’re right, you take tokens from Furriarty’s trail equal to the aspects you deduced and place them on the Investigation, discarding the Leads and Dead Ends. Note that if you guess both, you must get both right; otherwise, you’re incorrect, and your opponents are disallowed to tell you why. If you guess incorrectly, the Investigation stays open, and you draw no cards this turn. Usually, you end your turn by passing your two remaining cards, then drawing two new ones; instead, you’ll have no choice but to Investigate the cards you’re given next turn. This isn’t always the worst thing – I’ve found that if you’re down to two times and you know the suspect, or vice versa, it’s often worth taking the guess and, if necessary, taking next turn’s guess before you Investigate.

The goal, ultimately, is to catch Furriarty, who functions like a token and moves one spot forward each time everyone’s had a turn, revealing the token he passed. Furriarty is worth three points, while the other tokens range from one to three. Once closing an Investigation snags him, the game is over, and whoever has the most points is Scotland Pound Chief Inspector! If Furriarty reaches the end of the trail, though, and one last round isn’t enough to catch up, Furriarty escapes, everyone loses, and the player with the least points is… Litter Box Inspector. *shudder*

The timing is well-balanced, so it tends to be pretty close. You can call on Holmes for help, once per game, to take an extra guess and a one point penalty. Absolutely worth it, to not get stuck on box duty. And to catch that crook!