Random Geek Child

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.