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.
I gather Rummikub has many variants, but I’m only going to comment on the version I’ve played, for obvious practical reasons. If any of you play by different rules, though, I’d love to hear about it!
The version I’ve played goes like this: everyone draws 14 tiles at random out of the bag, and lays them out on their tray, where only they can see. Your goal is to make sets of 3 or more tiles, in either a consecutive run of the same color, or multiple colors of the same number. The tile selection is effectively two decks of standard playing cards, so there’s two of 1-13, in each of the four colors. There are also two wild tiles, that can be used in place of anything! The goal is to be the first player to empty your tray of tiles.
For your first play, you need to have 30 points of tiles, determined by adding their face values. If you can’t play, you draw another tile from the bag instead; in this fashion, you may find yourself with 26 tiles before you can actually play anything, draw that higher value tile you needed and suddenly clear out half of them! Getting on the board late, then, is not the game-defining disadvantage that it is in so many other games.
Once you’ve made that first play, you no longer have to hit a certain point threshold to play your tiles. Furthermore, you can now use the tiles other people have played to complete your sets, so long as the set they played remains complete! For instance, in the picture, I could take the red 3 from the far right set (which, having 4, 5, and 6, is still a valid run), swap it for the wild tile in the middle, and use it to make a run with… my blue 9 and 10, my yellow 5 and 6, my black 3 and 4, or my black 11 and 13. Or my black and red 13’s… Wild tiles bring a whole host of opportunities! You don’t have to make a new set, either; if you have a stray tile or three that fit an existing line-up, you can just add them on!
All of which is to say, Rummikub requires a lot of strategy and split concentration, to follow the ever-shifting layout of the board, your own tiles, and how to use both to maximum advantage. For a game with such simple mechanics, it’s certainly a challenge!
In Cryo, your colony ship has crash-landed on a frozen world, and your only hope is to wake your crew from cryostasis and relocate underground… before the sun sets, and the surface temperature drops from “inhospitable” to “certain death.” Under those circumstances, I expected this to be a cooperative game, but the ship was felled by anonymous sabotage and the crew has split into factions, each only looking out for their own. Which seems massively inefficient when everyone has the same goal right now, that being “don’t die,” but fear makes people irrational enough that I suppose the story checks out.
As for the mechanics, I was definitely impressed! Each player has their own platform for their faction’s materials, which they get by deploying and recalling drones to and from the shared board. To deploy, they take one drone from their platform and place it on an unobstructed dock, which lets them take one of that dock’s adjacent actions. There are many of these, scattered between the four sections of the ship, but the most important are Stasis Control, Resource Space, and Launch. Stasis Control lets you trade up to three organic materials for an equal number of your crew pods, which move from the stasis chambers on the ship segment to the safety of your platform. Launch – the one dock that can hold any number of drones – is how you transport crew pods from your platform to the underground caves, and Resource Space gives you a resource tile to either redeem for that benefit or place in a slot on your platform.
Those slots on your platform are important because of your other choice of action, to recall. When you do this, all of your drones on the board return to open docks on your platform. Each dock has an associated action. These start the game incomplete, with costs and/or rewards undefined. That’s what the resource tiles are for! Once all of an action’s slots are filled, you can activate it whenever you land a drone there, provided you have the resources to pay the cost. Some tiles even have two benefits, or a choice between two benefits, both of which are especially useful to keep!
One of these benefits is the option of drawing or playing a card. The cards are one of my favorite aspects of this game, because they can each be used in not one, not two, but three different ways! Four, actually, if you count scrapping them for materials. Equipping the card as an upgrade acts as a permanent effect, like Automation in the picture, which lets you take an additional platform action when you recall without having to land a drone there. Upgrades are at the top of each card. On the left is a mission, which gives you additional means of scoring points, and the body of the card is a vehicle. Vehicles are necessary to use the Launch dock, and each have a maximum number of crew pods they can store/carry. Some also have special effects! I think it’s pretty ingenious how they laid out the cards to have several mechanics each, and how they line up with the slots of the platform!
The other effect of recalling is resolving incidents, which serve as the ticking clock towards sunset. Each ship section has one face-up incident token; the active player will choose one to resolve. For most of the game, there are only two options: looting and sabotage. Looting gives you an immediate benefit, whether that’s materials, energy, or card actions. Sabotage destroys all crew pods in the lowest-numbered stasis chamber that hasn’t yet been destroyed. In the picture above, all four tokens are sabotage, so the next person to recall had no choice. But because section one of Engineering was already vacated, the explosion went off safely and no crew members were harmed! The last token to refill an incident space is sunset, the resolution of which ends the game.
The other way to end the game is if all of a player’s crew pods are in caverns or destroyed. Either way, it’s time for scoring! Each player scores points for crew pods in caverns and on their platform, upgrades and vehicles, mission conditions, and who has the most crew pods in each cavern. The player with the most points wins!
Cryo has a lot of moving parts, but because the overarching turn mechanics are simple and the board is well laid out, it isn’t overwhelming or hard to keep track of actions. Keeping track of what you have left to do is harder, but it’s definitely worth it!
According to the website, there are also solo rules.
The Captain is Dead is a cooperative board game reminiscent of Star Trek, in which characters of various color-coded skillsets work together to fend off an alien attack and repair the Jump Drive of their starship.
Characters start in the rooms of the ship that correspond to their skillsets. For example, the Teleporter Chief starts in Engineering. Each room (except the hallways) has Systems that provide useful bonuses while operational but can be damaged by Alerts. Alerts represent the damage done by the alien ship and are drawn after each player’s turn; if External Scanners are operational, you have the benefit of getting to see the next couple in advance before they hit! Some of the more inconvenient Alerts are Anomalies, which stay in play and have a continued effect until you research them away: Alien Ships, which join the one attacking you and amplify damages; and Hostile Aliens, which invade the ship and limit movement. And of course, many Alerts knock Systems offline.
Systems are repaired by a combination of Skill cards and actions. Each character has a set number of actions per turn, a rank to determine turn order, and a special ability – the first game, I played the Cyborg, who’s immune to Anomalies. Some of them also have Skill discounts. The Admiral, for example, has 2 Command discounts, so when that player would need to spend Command cards, they subtract 2 from the cost. This kind of spending also applies to Battle Plans and Upgrades. The former is a single-use advantage obtained in the War Room, while the latter are new Systems that can be researched and installed in the Science Lab. These especially are massive game changers! Our favorite was Epinephrine Ventilation, which gives everyone an extra action.
The victory condition is simple: repair the Jump Drive! Unfortunately, there are many ways to lose before you can. If you take damage that would lower your shields past 0%, have to add more Hostile Aliens to your ship than there are Hostile Aliens left, or have to draw an Alert when there are none left to play, the game is over and the crew has lost. In our first game, the one in the photo, we were so focused on fixing Systems we lost track of the Hostile Aliens and were overrun! The second game, though, we managed to get two Upgrades installed early, and rode that advantage to victory. It all depends on your characters and the cards!
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.
Cover Up is, in essence, Connect Four with depth. There are three rings in each well, with corresponding sized tokens. Each player has five of the smallest tokens, four medium, and three large. Here’s how it works:
You can never place a smaller token over something larger than it. The smallest tokens can only go in the smallest well, so if there’s a medium there already, you’d need to place a large. Tokens must always be played on top – no slipping something under a piece that’s already there. The first token of the game can’t be placed in the center, but after that, anywhere is fair game.
The goal is, of course, to be the first player with four of your tokens in a row, be it vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. To that end, you’ll likely be blocking your opponent’s rows and covering their tokens with yours. Just be careful – once you place a small or medium token, it can’t be moved again. Large disks, on the other hand, you can pick up and relocate. The trick here is remembering if your opponent had anything under it! If lifting your large disk creates a row of four for your opponent, they win immediately. I know I’ve lost that way before!
Cover Up is a pretty simple game, but, like MixUp, it adds a bit of flavor to the even simpler Connect Four.
Tic Tac Toe meets chess in Tic Tac Chec, a short and simple strategy game that can be used to teach new players how chess pieces move, or to shake things up a bit for more seasoned players. I’ve been playing chess for years, but adjusting to new mechanics is always a bit of a learning curve, and our first round was actually kind of embarrassing – we were both so busy setting ourselves up in chess terms, we forgot the Tic Tac Toe part. But I’m getting ahead of myself… again.
Each player has four pieces: a pawn, a knight, a bishop, and a rook, all of which move the same as they do in chess, except the pawn switches directions when it reaches the end of the board. Tracking that is a little tricky, so I’d advise having the pawn on the side of its space closest to where it’s going next, instead of centered. We figured that one out the hard way, too.
The board is a 4×4 grid, and the goal is to align all four of your pieces vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The first step of this is having pieces on the board – on your turn, you may place any one of your pieces on any open space. Once you have three pieces on the board, you may begin to move and capture as you would in regular chess; captured pieces are returned to their players and “can immediately be played again on any open square.” It’s up for interpretation whether than means “they get to place it as soon as you hand it back to them” or just “there’s no cooldown before they can use a turn to put it back on the board,” so sort that out with your opponent before the game begins. It’s also up to you whether the “three pieces on the board before moving” rule applies to more than the beginning of the game. The rules on this one are pretty loosely defined, so there’s a lot of room to experiment and see which way is the most fun for you!
Pairs is a press-your-luck game as simple as its name. The deck is triangular – there’s one 1, two 2’s, three 3’s, and so forth, all the way through ten. At the beginning of each round, every player is dealt a card face-up. Whoever has the lowest number goes first! (If there’s a tie, those players draw again, and so on until it’s resolved.)
On your turn, you may either hit or fold. When you hit, you’re drawing the top card of the deck and placing it face-up in front of you, alongside any other cards you’ve collected this round. The goal is to not get a matching pair. If you do, you take points equivalent to the number on the card (keep the card in front of you as a reminder) and all other cards in play are discarded. It’s time to start a new round. Folding also ends the round, but because you chose to stop, you score the lowest value card in play… even if it’s your opponent’s!
As you may have guessed, points are a bad thing. The first person to reach the target score – which is 60 divided by the number of players, plus 1 – loses. There are no winners in this game, just one loser, but I imagine you could play it elimination style if you have patient friends.
What we have (and what I linked to) is the Shallow Ones deck, illustrated by John Kovalic. As always with John’s work, the art is fantastic and frequently hilarious! It’s hard to see in the picture, because the card is upside down, but what Cthulhu and… I think that’s the Formless Spawn? From Cthulhu In The House? (…how have I not blogged that yet?)… regardless, what they’re watching in card #7 is, in fact, the contents of card #9. And card #10 is definitely the Shoggoth going to an optometrist. Poor optometrist.
