Friday Filler: Don’t Talk To Strangers

School has finished for the day, but your parents are not going to be home from work for hours yet. As a ‘latchkey kid’ you have to make your own way home or to the library or the pool or the afterschool pep rally, and that would be fine any other day. After all, your parents trust you and they have warned you to be careful of strangers, so you have been successfully making your way home from school for ages and without any problem whatsoever. Not today though! There are proper strangers on the prowl for little kids today. Otherworldly strangers with spindly, hairless green bodies and big black, unblinking eyes. In other words, little green men from outer space ready to abduct the children and whisk them away in their flying saucers. This is the set-up for Don’t Talk To Strangers, which is published by by Cryptozoic Entertainment and is part of the first trilogy of games—along with Let’s Dig for Treasure and Let’s Summon Demons—based on the art of Steven Rhodes, noted for its sly, subversive dig at the social attitudes and fears of the seventies and eighties. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is designed to be played by between one and four players, aged fourteen and up. The aim of the game is for a player to get as many of the thirteen kids under his charge to the homes, pool, park, pep rally, or library where they will be safe—for the most part—whilst avoiding their being abducting and perhaps ensuring that other kids get abducted instead, and ultimately, at the end of the game, score as many points as possible. A game can be played in twenty minutes or more, depending on the number of players. The aim of the game is for a player to get as many of the thirteen kids under his charge to the homes, pool, park, pep rally, or library where they will be safe—for the most part—whilst avoiding their being abducting and perhaps ensuring that other kids get abducted instead, and ultimately, at the end of the game, score as many points as possible.

Don’t Talk To Strangers consists of an eleven by seven-and-a-half-inch, double-sided board, a deck of one hundred cards, ten Stranger Tokens, fifty-two Kid Tokens, one Flying Saucer Coin, and a twelve-page mini-rulebook. The board shows the various homes, other locations, streets, bus stops, and Stranger spaces surrounding the kid’s school. Most locations in the board will score a player points at the end of the game, from the seven points of North End Mansion to the single point of the Library or spots in the South Pool. In addition, some locations grant extra benefits if a player has a kid there. For each kid in the Library, a player will increase his hand size by one, whilst for each kid in the South Park, he can increase the number of kids he has in place. The Stranger spaces are where the Strangers will land when a ‘Stranger Sighting’ card is played. Any Kid on a Stranger space when this occurs is abducted and out of the game and the presence of the Stranger on the Stranger space blocks movement through that space. The board is double-sided, the ‘Board B’ having a more complex layout and more Stranger spaces.

Most of the game’s cards are movement cards. For example, ‘Skateboard’ allows a player to move a Kid three spaces; ‘School Bus’ enables him to move a kid between any two Bus Stops; and ‘Hop the Fence’ lets him move a kid one space, but this can effectively be through a wall! A ‘Stranger Sighting’ means that a Stranger has been spotted and has to be added to the board on a ‘Stranger Spot’, whilst a ‘Saucer’ card forces a player to target a kid on the board, who can be from anywhere on the board, including those on a scoring space. He then flips the Flying Saucer Coin and if it lands ‘Saucer’ face up, the Kid is abducted out the game.

The game begins with each player having three cards and a Kid on the ‘Start’ space which is the school. On his turn, a player can do one of two things. One is to add a Kid to the ‘Start’ space, the other is to play a card. A player can only have one Kid in play. A Kid on a scoring location does not count towards this limit and a player can increase the number by gettinga Kid to the South Park location. Most of the time a player will play a card, move a Kid, and draw back up to his hand. However, if a ‘Stranger Sighting’ or a ‘Saucer’ card, he must play them immediately and resolve their effects. It is possible for a player to draw multiple ‘Stranger Sighting’ or ‘Saucer’ cards depending how the deck has been shuffled.

The continues until one player has managed to get all of his Kids to scoring locations, but very much more likely, all of the Stranger location cards have been filled—ten on ‘Board A’, eight on the more difficult ‘Board B’. At this point, each player totals the score he has from the Kids he has on scoring locations, and the player with highest score wins.

None of this game play is very challenging—if at all nor does it offer very in the way of variation. This makes the game better suited to a younger audience or a family audience, whilst the lack of variation means that more experienced players are unlikely to want to play it again.

Physically, Don’t Talk To Strangers is well presented. The rulebook is short and easy to read, and includes an example of play as well as explanations of what the various cards do. The artwork, with its bright, bold colours, is excellent, Steve Rhodes’ illustrations are excellent.

Don’t Talk To Strangers is underwhelming, both in terms of its limited game play and its humour. One of the pleasures of the games in this line is Steve Rhodes’ illustrations which are invariably sly and subversive. Not so in this game where only one card stood out, which is ‘New Step-Dad’ card which enables a player to move any Kid, including that of an opponent, from a Home or Mansion location to an empty Home or Mansion location, so changing their score valuable at game’s end. This has a witty element of social commentary that will hit home for some players—whether children or adults of a certain age—and which the other cards in the game lack.

At best, Don’t Talk To Strangers is an average filler game, at worst, the one in a gamer’s library which completes his collection of all six Steve Rhodes-themed games from Cryptozoic Entertainment. It is certainly far from the best in the series.