Category: Medium games

Now, wait, don’t get too excited, I’m not actually going on tour. Rather, I’m talking about a game called On Tour, in which you’re musicians trying to plan a tour to hit as many states as you can. It’s like 10 Days In The USA, right? Well, no.

For starters, it’s played on an erasable board with dry erase markers, but that’s not all. You see, in On Tour, you can only go to adjacent states in a given move. You’re also not going to only ten states, you’re going to as many as you can. And where you’re going isn’t based off of the color on the board, nor on adjacency alone, it’s also based on numbers. “What have numbers got to do with this,” you ask? Let me explain.

Each round, you flip over three state cards, and roll a pair of dice. You’ll get two numbers from the dice, once with the first die in the tens digit and the second in the ones, and one vice versa. For instance, if you roll a 2 and a 6, one of your numbers will be 26, and one will be 62. You then put each number in a state within at least one of the regions of the flipped cards, or, if you roll doubles, you put a star on one state in the available regions instead, which serves as a wild number. You can circle the number/star if you put it in one of the states you flipped, and not just the region. Eventually, every state will have a number or a star.

When finalizing the tour route, you can only go to a state of equal or greater numerical value to the one before it, so the game is a challenge of lining up the numbers in a manner that allows the most states without spreading them out so far that a stray number blocks the path. You also get bonus points for each circled state you visit, so try to incorporate as many of those as you can!

No, that isn’t misspelled. I really did mean “Bearicade,” not “barricade.” That’s because Mom and I recently played a wonderful card game called Bearicades, about forests and scared prey, and big, scary lumberjacks and equally big and scary predators, but they happen to be playing defense and trying to protect the prey, so they count as the good guys. You know something’s gone really bad to get the predators and the prey to team up!

So there are these cute animals, all innocent and stuff (yeah right, like that snake wasn’t just waiting for a lumberjack to bite!) that are specially grouped into forests. You can choose whether you want to play beginner style by color, or by ring numbers. Each has a special ability, which will be activated as specified on the card (sometimes it’s when the animal runs away, when you Flip the card, or some, like the Salmon, can just be activated whenever).

Then there are the lumberjacks. The active player for the turn (designated by the Frog) draws the top lumberjack and places him in the middle. But of course, no lumberjack lumberjacks by himself, so each lumberjack card lists a certain amount of friends of his who also get drawn. The active player then gets to distribute the lumberjacks between the forests in whatever manner they like, the only rule being that each has to have one.

Then comes the predator phase. There are some really cool predators in the deck, like Cougars, Bats, Foxes, and Angry Bees, but most of the predators are Bearicades. No, not “bears,” “Bearicades,” named as such because they can block a lumberjack, leaving both in play but, at least for the time being, neutralizing the threat. Bearicades also have abilities that can be utilized if they are discarded, depending on the species of Bearicades, including Flipping an animal, forcing lumberjacks to Run Away, or allowing a trade of themselves for another Bearicade in the discard. Other predators can do similar to the latter two, though some allow a switch for any predator in the discard, instead of just Bearicades.

In the sad event that a lumberjack is unstoppable and reaches your forest, you must choose one of your four animals to Run Away as a result. The good news is, the lumberjack follows it over to the discard pile. Some animals also have effects centered around running away, making them the strategic choice, depending on the situation. The bad news is, that animal is out of the game for good, and you only have four of them, so you have to be careful!

Once all of the lumberjacks have been taken care of in some way or another, whether they’re staring down a Bearicade or the back of another lumberjack in the discard, it becomes Night. The player with the Frog draws one Predator for each player still in the game, getting first pick as to which one they want. Each player gets one Predator to add to their hand, and then the Frog passes and the next long day of fighting off the evil forces of humanity begins.

Gee, another Out-Of-The-Box game! It’s almost like we have a lot of those in our house… Word On The Street Junior — surprise! — a word game. And, more than that, it’s on a street! That would make sense, given the name, right? Well, it’s true. The board is a five lane street (Honestly folks, can’t you choose an even number like a normal street? Jeez.) with the entire alphabet up the middle. Oh, wait! The middle is green, so it’s probably the grass divider between the two directions of traffic. But then the letters are… Yikes! Yes, kids, drive perpendicular to the street and across the dividers. Good plan. 

The players divide themselves into two teams and sit on opposite sides of the street. At the beginning, everyone decides whether it will be a green game or a blue game (easy or hard). The cards are shuffled and then set to have either the green or blue side facing out from the little card holder that just barely covers the questions (so you can’t cheat).

One team flips the timer while the other pulls a card. The card has a category (like “A Month” or “Something Blue.”) The team with the card has until the timer runs out to confer and choose something of that category. It must be one word (proper nouns are allowed, obviously, otherwise “A Month” would be pretty hard criteria to meet) and in English (no smart translations, sorry!), and the whole team must agree on it.

When the team has decided, they go through, spelling the word, moving each letter tile in the word one space closer to their side of the board. Once they move the third time in that direction and off the board, they have been captured and can no longer be moved. Whenever that letter is used in a word, it is simply noted as out of play and they spell the rest of the word. This is partially because the game would be incredibly difficult to play once the main letters (especially the vowels) had been used if you couldn’t use words with letters that had been captured, and the game would be over far too quickly.

For similar reasons, the board is five lanes instead of one or three, to allow the space for the players to give and take with the pieces, pulling it to the brink, then having it pulled back to the center, then slightly one way, then further the other, and so on. It’s quite amusing to watch the pieces move back and forth, and adds a strategy level to the game: it isn’t just about long words, it’s about finding the words with the letters on either edge to steal theirs and capture yours.

I think it would be fun to just play through everything and count up at the end, but that gets hard when the only letters left on the board are Q, U, W, V, Y, X and Z, in any combination thereof. So instead, the goal of the game is to have captured at least eight letters. The first team to do so wins.