Category: Quick games

To nobody’s surprise, the game Adventures of Riley: Penguin Rescue is about rescuing penguins. The characters are all part of the same rescue team, so it’s a very friendly competition… it’s just a matter of who can collect all 5 colors of penguins first!

The penguins’ colors match the colors on the dice, and the spaces on the board. Movement is simple – follow the arrows to the nearest of each color you rolled. You get to choose which order to resolve them in, though, so use that to your advantage! There’s a bit less choice involved when you roll two of the same color, but you do get to roll again once you’re done! Some spaces are slides, which you can use to skip sections or slide back to Start in the middle of the board. If there’s a stranded penguin on the slide, you can take it with you! There are also Rescue Zones, which let you collect any one of their remaining penguins when you land there. If you’re lucky, you might be able to hit it twice in one turn! Just remember, you can only have one of each color penguin, which are also differentiated by size and numbers, so it’s pretty easy to tell!

The sixth side of the die is the Wild side. If you roll this, or land on a Krill space on the board, you must immediately draw the Krill card and resolve its effects. Most commonly, these have you move forward or back a certain number of spaces, but they may also send you back to Start, end your movement for the turn, or have you un-rescue someone else’s penguin. (Unfortunate, but sometimes warmer ocean temperatures around the Antarctic Peninsula are endangering Uncle Max’s colony, and a penguin flees to safer ice. It’s for the best.) If you roll two Wild sides, though, you get to move anywhere on the board! Including a Rescue Zone, if you so desire.

Once you have all five of your penguins, you still have to make it back to Start. And honestly? We found this to be way harder than collecting all the birds. There were several rounds where both of us had achieved a full iceberg, but we kept passing over all the slides home. I suppose that’s when a double Wild would have been really useful, huh?

It’s a simple game, fun, and the cards are clearly aimed to be educational. The little penguin figures have also been kitten-approved as extremely entertaining! (No penguins or cats were harmed by this fascination, but she did bat them off the board several times. While sitting in the box. Because of course she did.)

Pick up Sticks is another classic, of the Jacks and Tiddlywinks variety. I actually have a combo set of all three, which is why they’re getting posted in such quick succession.

Setting up Pick up Sticks is really easy. You take all the sticks, save one, hold them upright in one hand (hand on the table) and then you just… let go. Whatever crisscrossing spread they’ve landed in is what you’ve got to work with!

The goal is to pick up the sticks (shocking, I know), one at a time and without jostling any of the other sticks in the process. The exception to this is the stick you set aside at the beginning, which you can use to help pick up the other sticks. When your efforts move any piece other than the one you’re trying to remove, your turn is over and the next player gets a go at it.

I suspect scoring varies by set, but for mine it’s color-coded: 10 points for yellow, 25 for red, 40 for blue and 50 for green. This can serve to even out the game, if all the easy pickings for the first player are yellow and red, or pretty much settle it from the get-go if they’re blue and green. Depends on the luck of the draw… or more accurately, the luck of the fall. Beyond that, it’s sort of like Operation, without the buzzing and with a lot more angles to go at it from.

Agent 299 is a great game I was introduced to at GameholeCon – it takes a little strategy, a little memory, and a little deck. Seriously, the whole game is 10 cards, 9 if you exclude the rules. It’s a pocket card game!

It’s also a game of the rarer sort, where you don’t look at your own cards. Cards are instead laid out face down, split evenly between the players, with the leftover card (in a 2- or 4-player game) face down in the middle. Who goes first is up to you to decide – we flipped a coaster – but whoever that is gets the rules card, which doubles as a First Player marker. Starting with them and working around the table, each player must perform an Interrogation. This can work one of two ways: firstly, by peeking at one face-down card in front of another player, and swapping one of their own cards (face-up or face-down) for any one of that player’s. Alternatively, in a 2- or 4-player game you may instead peek at the card in the middle and swap it with any card.

After all players have performed an Interrogation, the person with the First Player card must flip one of their cards face-up. Some of these have abilities that are usable once revealed, but only for so long as they’re in front of you… and again, face-up cards can be stolen! (Ok, swapped for, but if you’re getting a Blown Cover worth negative 3 points – and nothing else – for your super useful ability card… it’s not exactly an agreeable trade.)

The game ends when the active player can’t perform an Interrogation (everyone else’s cards are all face-up) or a Disclosure (all of their cards are face-up and they don’t have Secret Documents, which would let them skip this step), at which point scores are tallied from the cards you have in front of you. Check them all – most cards only score when face-up, but the Blackmail card gives you a 2-point bonus if you have it face-down at the end of the game. In the case of a tie, the winner is whoever has the Top Secret Documents card face-up… or, failing, that, the Secret Documents card face-up, or failing that, the Blackmail card, regardless of where its face is. It’s a very thorough hierarchy.

I like this game a lot, mostly for how portable it is – I’ve actually taken to keeping it in my phone case, in case the opportunity for a game arises. And don’t they always?

Who’s that- Wait, no, sorry, Tiddlywinks may sound like a Pokémon, but it’s actually another classic game! Where Jacks requires speed and coordination, Tiddlywinks is more focused on aim. And physics, if you want to be technical about it.

As you can see in the picture above, the play mat looks sort of like an archery target if archery targets were smaller, thinner, and laid flat on a horizontal surface. You may also notice that players are seated on corners, not sides, and that we each have a little felt rectangle over our arrows – these are the launchpads from which the “winks” are fired.

Winks are the small, color-coded disks you see scattered across the play area. You turn starts by placing one of these on the felt pad. Then, using a larger disk of the same material and thickness, players press down on the edge of their wink, launching it forward. Once players have alternated their way through all their winks, points are determined by the values of the rings they landed in. The cup in the center is a valid target, and if you manage to get a wink in there it’s 50 points! It’s a challenging angle, though, with a significant potential for overshooting – a lesson we learned the hard way.

There’s definitely a learning curve to the amount of force you use and the angle it’s applied; whether you approach that with physics equations or trial-and-error, it’s a neat new skill to learn! Besides that, the game is quite simple, making it perfect for a lazy afternoon of uncomplicated fun.

Catch The Monkeys is one of those games like Tic Tac Toe or Hangman where you can get a printed board, or you can just draw one yourself. You could probably adjust the size as you like for longer or shorter gameplay, but the version I found is an 11×6 array of dots with ten monkeys in between them.

On your turn, you draw a line between two adjacent dots. That’s it! Then the next player draws a line. Simple, right? But also not – whoever completes a box (draws the fourth line to make a one-unit square) puts their initial inside it. Regardless of who drew the other three lines, the player who finished it gets the point! While normal boxes are worth one point, boxes with monkeys in them are worth five, and when all squares are drawn whoever has the most points wins.

Catch The Monkeys definitely isn’t hard to learn, but the strategy that goes into it will get you thinking. If deceptively strategic games are your cup of tea, you might want to give this a try! All you need is paper, a writing utensil and someone to play with.