Friday Filler: Split the Hoard

You have persevered. You have made it to the end of the dungeon. The dragon is dead. You survived. Right before you are not only the dragon’s hulking corpse, but also its hoard. Mounds of gold coins and gems and jewels. Then the magical items. What matters now is how you divide the hoard between you. It would not be too difficult normally, but this time, there is a deadline looming. Scavengers are coming to take what they can and they will not take any prisoners. So, you need to pick over the hoard, argue for the best bits, and get out again. And you do not have to entirely honest about it—you can demand it or even steal it too! All of you are savvy enough to get out of the dungeons, but the question is, who is going to get out with the most and the best? As veteran adventurers, you know it is never a good idea to split the party, but splitting the hoard is another matter.

This is the set-up to Split the Hoard. This is the first card game from EN Publishing, known for the ACE!—or the Awfully Cheerful Engine!—and Level Up! roleplaying games. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is intended to be played by between two and five players, aged fourteen and over, and plays in twenty minutes.

Split the Hoard consists of five Player Boards and five Privacy Screens, one-hundred-and-three Hoard cards, twenty Title cards, a Dragon card, the Rulebook, and the Appendices. The five Player Boards depict five classic fantasy archetypes—Cleric, Druid, Rogue, Warrior, and Wizard—and grant an ability, mark the three spaces where the player places the Hoard cards representing treasure he has found, and shows the round order. For example, the Warrior’s ability is to win ties for Arms titles and gain a random treasure from the Hoard deck if an Arms treasure is taken from his haul. The spaces on the Player Board where he places treasures up for negotiation are marked with one, two, or three coins. One oddity is that the Player Boards are double-sided, but the same on both sides, where it would have been nice for the illustration of the hero to be of one gender on one side and another on the other, or perhaps a different ability.

The Hoard cards are double-sided. On the back is a Coin and when played face down like this, these Coin cards are used to set the prices for treasures and to purchase treasures. On the front of each Hoard card is the details of a specific treasure. These are divided into five categories—Arcane, Arms, Holy, Natural, and Wealth—corresponding to the five archetypes of the Player Boards. A Treasure card either has a ‘Rank’ or ‘Victory Point’ value. The ‘Rank’ value is totalled in combination with other Treasure cards to determine if a hero is eligible to certain Title card. The ‘Victory Point’ value contributes to a player’s final score at the end of the game. A Treasure card will also have a special ability. For example, the ‘Grimoire’ can be discarded in the Claim phase to allow a player to draw an extra hidden Title card from the Title deck, whilst in the Negotiate phase, the ‘Sword’ can be discarded to allow a player to negotiate for an extra Treasure.

The Title cards are scoring objectives for the game. Each has a victory condition such as “Score if you have the highest combined value of rank cards” for the Archmage or “Score if you possess a Ruby and an Armour” for the Captain. Five of these are the Starting Titles that are visible from the beginning of the game and can be won by anyone. The others are kept secret by the players before being revealed at the end of the game to see if their scoring conditions have been fulfilled.

Penultimately, the ‘Rulebook’ is short at just twenty-pages, but includes examples of play throughout. Lastly, the ‘Appendices’ is almost three times the length of the ‘Rulebook’ and explains how each of the Treasure cards and Title cards work. It is a handy reference that makes it easier to check the specifics of each Treasure card or Title card and it also has examples of the game’s cards in play as well.

At the start of the game, each player receives a random Player Board, a Privacy Screen, a random Title card, and four Coin cards. The five Starting Titles are placed where everyone can see them. The game is played in rounds consisting of three phases—‘Reveal’, ‘Negotiate’, and ‘Claim’. In the ‘Reveal’ phase, the players take it in turns to draw three Treasure cards and arrange them however they want on the one, two, or three slots on their Player Board, one Treasure card per slot. A Player can increase the cost of a Treasure by adding Coin cards from his Haul.

In the ‘Negotiate’ phase, each player lifts his Privacy Screen and reveals the Treasures has picked over from the Hoard. In turn, each player either takes two cards from the Hoard deck as Coin cards (that is, face down) and adds them to his Haul or negotiates for a single Treasure from another player. As long as the active player can pay the cost in Coin cards, determined by the base cost for the slot on another player’s Player Board and any extra Coin cards the player has placed on his Player Board, a player cannot stop the active player from taking a Treasure card. In the phase, ‘Claim’, Coin cards placed on Player Boards to increase Treasure prices are discarded and any Treasures remaining on a Player Board go into their respective player’s Haul. If there are no Treasures on a player’s Player Board, he draws three new Treasure cards and adds them to his Haul.

The heart of the game play for Split the Hoard is all built around a ‘I Cut, You Choose’ mechanic in which each player is deciding upon the value of his Treasure cards he is offering in each round, whilst the other players are deciding whether or not to choose something. Here is where the bluff and speculation come into play, rather than negotiation as such. Indeed, the actual ‘Negotiate’ phase is a misnomer since no actual negotiation. Instead, what a player is trying to do find the Treasure cards he wants on other player’s Player Boards whilst trying to keep hold of these he wants to score with at the end of the game. The obvious way to do that is protect a Treasure card by increasing the price that another player has to pay, but this has its own cost, since a player must invest Coins to raise that price. If the Treasure they are attached to is bought, the player will get the Coins back, but if not, they are lost. This is where the speculation comes into play. Further, a player could actually lure another player into thinking a Treasure with Coin cards attached is actually valuable or something he wants, bluffing the player into thinking that he is denying him a Treasure he wants to keep.

The aim of the game is, of course, for a player to get Treasure cards into his Haul and use them to score points at the end of the game. However, a player can also discard a face-up Treasure card from his Haul to activate its ability. The range from being able to draw more Coins from the Hoard deck, more Titles from the Title deck, take an extra Treasure from another player’s Player Board, move a Treasure from your Player Board to your Haul, and so on, manipulating different parts of the game’s play. Each player must balance the need to keep Treasure cards for the end game’s scoring and using their special abilities. Treasure cards played for their special abilities can be played at any time during the phase indicated on the card, even when it is not a player’s turn.

The game ends when a player cannot draw any cards from the Hoard deck. Each player scores Victory Points for Starting Tile cards and Hidden Title cards whose scoring conditions they fulfilled and then also for Treasure cards. If there is a tie, the winner is the player with the most Coins in his Haul. Here is where the game play gets complex in comparison to the base game play as each player tries to work out his total Rank value from the Treasure cards in his Haul to determine which Title cards he qualifies for. This is the hardest bit of Split the Hoard to learn and teach, but once everyone has the hang of it, game play is fast enough.

Physically, Split the Hoard is very nicely presented. Both ‘Rulebook’ and ‘Appendices’ are well written and provide clear explanations of the various parts of the game. The artwork on the cards is excellent and everything is solid and sturdy. EN Publishing has done an excellent job with the production values on Split the Hoard.

Split the Hoard is a very likeable game, good looking, easy to teach and play, and makes excellent use of its theme. It is a very solid filler that fans of classic fantasy roleplaying will definitely enjoy and a good first game from EN Publishing.

Friday Filler: dnup

If you like Scout, then you will like dnup. It is a card-shedding game, just like Scout, but is smaller, less complicated, easier to teach, and plays faster. It is also from the designer as Scout. The latter, published by Oink Games, was a Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2022 and won the Origins Award for Best Card Game in 2023. It is not an Oink Games title though—and not just because the components fit in the box! Another difference is that there is no semblance of theme with dnup.

dnup—short for ‘Down up’—is published by the Asmodee Group. It is designed to be played by between two and five players, aged eight and up, and can be played in fifteen minutes. The aim of game for each player is to try to empty his hand of cards. This done by playing cards from his hand as sets of the same value that are of a higher value or greater size than the ones on the table. If a player is the first to empty his hand this way in a round, he gains two letters. The next player to empty his hand, gains a single letter. The first player to be able to spell ‘dnup’ with his letters wins the game.

dnup consists of forty cards, five Player Aid cards, sixteen letter tokens, and the rules leaflet. The forty cards are marked with two different numbers. The cards can be turned over so that the upper number can always be read, but the lower number is always upside down and cannot be read as easily. The Player Aid cards show the card distribution at each player count and the actions that a player can take each round. The sixteen letter tokens are used to keep of player score.

At the start of a round, each player receives a hand of cards, the number varying depending on the number of players. A player can rearrange the cards in hand at any time. When he receives his hand; when it is not his turn; and when he picks up cards. What he cannot do is rotate his hand. What this means is that he can build sets of cards easily throughout the play of the game. On his turn, a player first discards any set he played the previous turn and takes on action. He can play a set of cards onto the table on front of him; add a card to an opponent’s set; take a set of cards from in front of an opponent; or rotate the cards in his hand. Unlike in Scout, where there is one set of cards on the table, in dnup, each player has a set in front of him. When a set is played, it must be bigger than another set already in front of another player. When it is, the lower set must be returned to its player, who must rotate the returned cards before adding them to his hand. If a player adds a card to an opponent’s hand and it increases the value of the set in comparison to another set, that lowered valued set is returned to its player’s hand. This is a key tactical move as it forces cards back into a player’s hand and they will not be same value because the cards have to be rotated. Similarly, a player can play a low set in the hope that another player will put down a better set and force him to take the cards back into his hand, and rotating them, give him cards with numbers he can use to make better sets. This adds some nice tactical options. Of course, taking cards back into a player’s hand means that he has to rotate them and he has to rearrange them. Sometimes that can be advantageous for a player, sometimes not. When it is not, a player will have to rebuild a set, but the game play is speedy enough that it does not take long.

dnup does include a two-player option. For this, each player has two play areas and can play sets into both areas. This also means that sets in a player’s play areas can conflict with each other, but it also means that a player can use it to his advantage. However, the two-player option is not quite as fun as there is not the same degree of interplay between the players. Thus, dnup plays better with multiple players.

Physically, dnup is very nicely presented. The rules are simple and clear, and the cards are attractive in bright and breezy colours.

dnup is as bright and breezy as it looks. The game is easy to teach and learn, and it plays easy too. This means that it plays well with families and younger players, but there is just enough of an edge to the game that experienced players can play it a bit more cutthroat.

Friday Filler: Maskmen

The mini-games from Oink Games pack a lot of game play into small packages. In fact, the publisher’s small boxes have become as much part of its signature trade design as a design challenge for its game designers who have to pack their creations into these small boxes. The result is that the games themselves are easy to fit on the shelf and easy to fit into a pocket or bag to take to the next game session. And another aspect of Oink Games’ designs is that they have been around longer than most gamers realise, much longer than the publisher’s breakout title, Scout, published in 2019 and the Origins Awards Best Card Game Winner and a Spiel des Jahres Nominee in 2022. Maskmen is a much older game, having been published in 2014, and shares some similarities with Scout. In both games, the players must play cards (or pieces) of an equal or higher value of the previous set already played. Of course, both mechanics and theme differ. Scout is a ‘card shedding’ game, whereas Maskmen is ‘ladder climbing’ game and in Scout, the players were trying to have their performers outperform each other in the circus, in Maskmen, the players are promotors trying to have their wrestlers gain dominance over each other and win Lucha libre seasons.

Maskmen is designed to be played by two to six players, aged nine plus, and can be played in twenty minutes. Inside the box are sixty Wrestler Cards, thirty Strength Markers, and twelve Score Markers. The Wrestler Cards represent the six different wrestlers in different colours, ten each. The Strength Markers match the colours of the Wrestler Cards and there are five of each colour. Both Wrestler Cards and Strength Markers depict the masks worn by the luchadores, the masked Mexican wresters, and importantly, the Wrestler Cards are not numbered. The Score Markers are valued ‘+2’, ‘+1’, and ‘-1’, and are awarded at the end of each season for the winner, the runner-up, and the player in last place. The game is played over four rounds or Seasons and the player with the most points at the end of the four is the winner.

At the start of each season, each player is dealt a hand of Wrestler Cards, the amount varying according to the number of players. The first player—initially determined by the most recent person to have viewed a wrestling match, but on subsequent seasons, the player who came last in the previous season—plays one Wrestler Card. This puts the Strength Marker for one luchador into the ring. Subsequently, the players can play their Wrestler Cards in one of two ways. The first is to establish a luchador whose dominance over any luchador has yet to be established. This must be over another luchador and done with one more Wrestler Card than was previous played, up to a maximum of three cards. The other is to play Wrestler Cards on a luchador who is stronger than a previously played luchador. If a player cannot or does not want to play any more Wrestler Cards, he can ‘throw in the towel’ and his participation in the Season is over.

What is important here is that the Wrestler Cards are not numbered and instead, it is the number of Wrestler Cards played on a luchador versus another luchador that establishes the dominance of one over another. The dominance of one luchador over another is tracked using the Strength Markers. These depict the masks of Maskmen’s six luchadores and have little cutouts where each luchador’s mouth and chin are visible. These cutouts match the curve of the top of each luchador’s head, which means they can be stacked up the table to show which one is on top of another and has dominance over the luchadores below him. Once dominance has been established for one luchador over another, it cannot be changed during the season. However, it is not always possible to establish the ladders, or hierarchies, of dominance of every luchador over another and this can lead to the creation of multiple ladders on the table, showing the relationships between some luchadores, but not others.

Ultimately, a season will come to an end when one player has played all of his cards for that season. He wins the season and the ‘+2’ winner’s belt. The runner-up is determined by whomever has the least cards in his hand, and the loser, the one with the most.

Although the aim of every play is to empty his hand, he need not rush to do so. There is scope in Maskmen to be tactical, a player might hold three Wrestler Cards of one colour until it is the right moment to establish a luchador’s dominance rather than rushing them out early, playing smaller numbers of cards to maintain dominance, and so on. It is not too tactical though, just enough to keep a veteran player happy and a casual player intrigued. The game is at its most casual at two players, random at five or six with the cards divided among so many players, and cutthroat at three of four.

The theme of battling luchadores is a way for the players to empty their hands of Wrestler Cards, but whilst quite light, it is a stronger than in Scout. This is because the theme in Scout does not affect or enable the telling of stories, whereas in Maskmen, the theme of one luchador being stronger or better than another is physically depicted in the ladder of masks on the table and players can, if they want, tell the story of how any one luchador performs over a whole season. Plus, over the course of the game, a luchador of one colour might be at the bottom of the hierarchy in one season, only to bounce back in the next season and narratively, fight his way to the top.

Physically, Maskmen is a sturdy tight package. The artwork on the Wrestler Cards and the Strength Markers is striking and simple, whilst the rules pamphlet is easy to read. The stacking of the Strength Markers which show the hierarchy of dominance is not as easy to understand as it could be and the owner of Maskmen should definitely play through a few hands himself to understand how it works before teaching it to others.

Maskmen is a fun little filler, which makes use of an engaging theme to drive its game play. Its basic play is easy to teach (though some elements not quite so much) and it offers some depth beyond that, but not too much, making suitable for family and casual play as well as play by experienced players too.

Friday Filler: Flip 7

Flip 7 is a simple, push your luck card game. It is easy to learn and easy to teach and it plays fast. It also suitable for families, and if truth be told, it is really simple. Yet there is a tension to the game play that really can keep the players on the edge of their seat from one turn to the next. Published by The Op Games—responsible for the highly pleasurable Tacta—it is a designed for play by three to seven players, aged eight and up, and a game can be played though in roughly fifteen to twenty-five minutes. The aim of the game is to be the first person to score two hundred points. Points are scored based on the total value of the cards a player has in front of him. Each turn, a player receives a card from the Dealer and turns it over, adding it to the cards he has in front of him. If he receives a card with the same value as a card he already has, he is bust and out of the round, scoring nothing, but if a player receives seven cards that do not match, he scores a ‘Flip 7’, and is awarded bonus points.

Flip 7 comes in a bright and breezy box which contains just ninety-four cards and a rules leaflet. Eighty-one of these cards consist of numbers ranging from zero to twelve. The number of cards with each value is equal to value on the cards. Thus, there are ten cards marked with ten, seven cards marked with seven, three cards marked with three, and so on. The exception to this is, of course, the card marked with zero, of which there is just the one.

The other cards are Action cards and Modifier cards. There are three types of Action card. ‘Flip Three!’ forces a player accept and flip three more cards, whilst ‘Freeze!’ forces a player to end his participation in the round and bank the total score. When he receives a ‘Flip Three!’ or ‘Freeze!’ Action card, a player can play them on himself, but he can also play them on another player. A ‘Second Chance!’ Action card must be kept by the player who receives it and comes into play when he receives a duplicate value card, in which case both the ‘Second Chance!’ card and the duplicate value are discarded. A player can only use one ‘Second Chance!’ per round and if he receives a second, must give it to another player. The Modifier cards range in value from ‘+2’ to ‘+10’ and also include a ‘×2’ card. These do not count to the ‘Flip 7’ bonus, but will alter a player’s score for the round.

Set-up and play are simple. The cards are shuffled, and one person is designated the dealer, who in turn deals out a single card to each player and they place the cards in front of them or resolve any Action card. Each turn a player can decide to ‘Hit’ and receive another card or ‘Stay’ and not receive any further cards, ending his participation in the round. If a player receives a card whose value is equal to a card that he already he has, he is ‘bust’, which ends the round for him with no score. Play continues until all of the players have either gone ‘bust’ or decided to ‘Stay’, which ends the round. A round will end if a player achieves a ‘Flip 7’. The game continues until a player has scored two hundred points.

The risk and the push-your-luck aspect of Flip 7 lies in both the value of the cards and the number of them in the deck. Higher value cards score more points, of course, but there are more of them the higher the value, and thus there is a greater chance of a player receiving a duplicate card and being forced to go ‘bust’. So, a player wants the higher value cards for their scoring value, but is constantly wary of receiving duplicate cards and scoring no points at all. Conversely, the lower value cards will score fewer points, but there are fewer of them and the chance of a duplicate is lower. From the start of a round the player is aware of the number and values of the cards in the deck and as a round progresses, the cards his rival players have in front of them will also indicate how many cards there are left in the deck and what their values are going to be.

The tension between the desire to score points and the increasing possibility of going ‘bust’ and scoring no points is made that much more sharper because everyone can see what cards everyone else has in play. So, they can see how close they are to going ‘bust’ and feel that tension too. Is that player going to go ‘bust’ or is he going to be lucky and receive another card that pushes him one step further closer to a ‘Flip 7’? The luck of the draw can go the other way, of course, and a player might find himself going ‘bust’ after receiving just two or three cards! Further, as the rounds progress and the total scores rise, the tension also goes up as players attempt to catch up with their rivals—and the thing is, with the right cards and perhaps a Modifier card to two, it is entirely possible.

Physically, Flip 7 is nicely put together. The cards are big, bright, and easy to understand, whatever the age of the player. The rules are also clearly written and include scoring examples for the Modifier cards as well.

Flip 7 is really no more complex than Vingt-et-un or Blackjack, though of course, without the gambling aspect. It is a really simple game to play and understand, one that constantly asks a player to push his luck and wonder if another card is worth the risk. Flip 7 is a real filler of a game that just sometimes can be a real thriller of a game.

Friday Filler: Tacta

Tacta, published by The Op Games, is a game of connecting cards and covering them up, of twisting them and flipping to make the right connections, and ultimately, trying to be the one with most dots visible. The game play is incredibly simple to play and teach, but it can get slightly complex when trying to find the right place to place the cards. The playing time is about twenty minutes, it can be played on any size surface—even odd ones if there is other stuff on the table, and it is designed to be played by two to six players, aged seven and over. Quite simply, Tacta is a great filler game with decent replay value because of its simplicity.

What really stands out about Tacta are its cards. There are one-hundred-and-eight of these, double-sided and matt black except for the neon markings that line the edge of the cards and the various shapes that appear to be cut into the blackness of the cards—triangles, squares, and rectangles. Some of these are marked with dots and some are simple outlines. The look of the cards is simple, but amazing, almost as if they have burst out of the film, Tron. The cards are divided into six decks—coloured blue, green, orange, pink, purple, and red—of eighteen cards each and each deck is identical.

The aim of the game is simple and that is to have the most dots visible from your colour cards. Do that and a player wins. To do that, each player will be placing one card on his turn. This can be from the top or bottom of the deck—the cards are double-sided, and the card drawn must be placed so that one of its features, whether a triangle, square, or rectangle, covers up a feature on a card belonging to another player. Ideally this should with the dots showing and if it covers up another player’s feature with dots, then all the better, but a blank feature will still cover another player’s feature with dots and prevent them from being adding to that player’s final score. A player will also be thinking about how he can protect the features with dots on his cards from being covered over by the other players, so that there is defensive element to placement as well. There are few limits on card placement, the primary being that a card cannot cover another card when played and cannot connect to features that do not perfectly match.

Set-up itself is simple. Each player receives a deck and shuffles it, holding it in hand so that card can be drawn from the top and bottom of the deck rather being fanned out. The starting card is placed in the middle of the table. It has a simple white grid on it that allows any shape to be played onto it. After that, the players take it in turns to draw and play cards, the play area quickly filling with the cards in a tightly packed and connected sprawl. At the end of the game, everyone counts up the number of dots that are visible on their cards and the player with the highest total wins.

The core game play of Tacta is simple and easy to explain. However, this is not the only way to play and the game includes five alternate ways. There is an option for shorter playing time by removing cards from each player’s deck, playing as teams—dividing each deck between two players, and even a real time version in which everyone tries to empty their deck first and trigger scoring before anyone else can. This works well for larger groups. There is also a version where players share decks, but only score from their own colour, so they are trying to sabotage the player holding the other half of their deck, whilst still trying to score with what they have their own. The team play, free play, and sabotage play are the most out of the alternatives given.

Physically, Tacta is very black, from the box to the rulebook, all highlighted in the game’s neon colours. The rulebook is very easy to read and the cards simple to use, each deck also being marked with a symbol for the colour blind.

Tacta is a great filler. It is simple and easy to learn and teach, so is family friendly, but it can get cutthroat too as players aggressively hunt for their opponents’ dots to cover. Lastly, its stark neon on black design really gives it a presence on the table.

Friday Filler: Rafter Five

Everyone has agreed that the best way of getting off the island is to build a raft. However, nobody can agree on the best way to build a raft, or even how to build a raft. Whilst everyone has also agreed that the best way to get off the island with their treasure is the raft, the raft is so rickety that it is in danger of collapsing and dumping everyone into the sea. Fortunately, there are no sharks, but when you fall into the sea, it is everyone for themselves as they try to rescue their treasure. It is perfectly possible to rescue your own treasure, but not the treasures belonging to your fellow raft builders, and if you lose their treasure, they will get mad at you and throw you off the raft! This is the set-up for Rafter Five, a fast-playing dexterity game for one to six players, ages seven and up. Published by Oink Games—best known for the games Scout and Deep Sea Rescue—Rafter Five is a game that uses all of its components, including the box lid and base, looks great on the table, plays in twenty minutes or so (but probably faster depending on the dexterity of the players), and surprisingly for an Oink Games title, is not a squeeze to get back in the box!

Rafter Five consists of five Rafters, forty-two Treasure Chests, six Penalty Boards, one Raft Card, forty-two Lumber Cards, and the rules leaflet. The Rafters are the game’s meeples, ones that the players will move around from one turn to the next. They are much larger than standard meeples and vary in size and shape, tall, fat, thin, short, and really help to give the game much of its character. Plus, they feel good in the hand. The Treasure Chests come in six colours, so that each player has a set of seven. The Penalty Boards also come in six colours to match the Treasure Chests and have five slots marked with an ‘X’. If a player’s Penalty Board is filled up with the Treasure Chests of the other players, he loses and is out of the game. The Raft card forms the base for the players’ raft, whilst the Lumber Cards are slightly wavey lengths of card, marked with the sea on one side and wood on the other.

Set up is simple. The game’s box is turned upside down, placed in the centre of the table, and the lid to the box is placed on top, also upside down. The Raft Card is put on top of the lid, as are all five Rafters. Each player receives the Penalty Board and Treasure Chests of his colour. In two- and three-player games, each player will be given Penalty Boards and Treasure Chests of multiple colours.

The aim of Rafter Five is to build as big a raft as possible, whilst loading it up with treasure, without it collapsing. When it does collapse, the player who caused the collapse receives all of the Treasure Chests tipped into the sea. He keeps his own Treasure Chests to place again, but Treasure Chests belonging to the other players must be put onto his Penalty Board. If a player accrues five Treasure Chests belonging to other players on his Penalty Board, the game ends, and he is the loser, whilst everyone else wins! The game also ends when there are no more Lumber cards to place or all of the players have put their Treasure Chests on the raft. In either case, the player with the most Treasure Chests belonging to other players on his Penalty Board is the loser and everyone else wins.

On his turn, a player does three things. He picks up a single Rafter from the raft and then a Lumber Card. He must then place the Lumber Card on the raft and the Rafter on top of that. The Lumber Card must be placed so that part of it is on top of another Lumber Card on the raft (except on the first turn, when a player is free to place the Lumber card how he wants). Lastly, he put one of his Treasure Chests anywhere on the Lumber Card he just placed.

Rafter Five is as simple as that, but the longer a game goes on and the more that Lumber Cards and Treasure Cards are added, the more precarious the splay of the Lumber cards that make up the poorly constructed raft grows. The Rafters are the balancing factor, acting as a counterweight to lengths of Lumber Card hanging over the edge of the raft with their Treasure Chests perched precariously on their lengths. Picking the right one can the key to a tense, but safe turn, but pick the wrong one and everything goes tumbling into the sea! Placing a Treasure Chest where it is more likely to tip into the sea, such as at the end of a Lumber Card, dangling over the edge, is a legitimate move, but this highlights the key aspect to Rafter Five. Most dexterity games are about placing one thing or removing one thing to a stack. Rafter Five is about placing three—the Rafter, the Lumber Card, and the Treasure Chest!

Physically, Rafter Five is very nicely presented and packaged. The components are of good quality and the Rafter pieces are nice and sturdy in the hand, and ever so cute! The simplicity of the game means that the rules are easy to read and grasp.

Rafter Five does include a solo-mode, but it is more of a stacking puzzle than a game, so consequently less interesting. That said, the game plays well at whatever player count, with four or five being about right, and it is suited to play by the family, being very easy to teach and learn. Rafter Five is a great filler game, easy to learn, quick to play, but full of tension that grows and grows as more Lumber Cards are added to the raft.

Friday Filler: Order Overload Café

Ever spent a shift in a café receiving and trying to fulfil ever more confusing orders from probably annoying customers? Being forced to put on your best customer service and make sure that despite the confusion and despite the probable annoyance, the customer receives the right order with a smile? Well, that is what playing Order Overload Café is all about. Published by Oink Games—best known for the games Scout and Deep Sea Rescue—Order Overload Café is a game about memorising confused orders from too many customers in which every employee in the café has to do their very best to remember as much as they can. As the game progresses, the café gets busier and the orders get bigger and more complex. This is a co-operative game and it is designed to be played by between two and six players, aged six and over, with a typical game lasting no more than twenty minutes.

Being an Oink Games title, Order Overload Café comes in a tiny attractive box which is packed tight—but thankfully, not too tight, with the game’s components, Besides the ‘Game Instructions’, these include eighty-four Order Cards, six Special Ability Cards, seven Level Tokens, and six Salesperson Tokens. The Order Cards include a wide range of drinks and snacks—French Toast, Banana, Chocolate Chip Cookie, Banana Milk, Iced Coffee, Iced Coffee without Ice, Room Temperature Coffee, Extra Hot Café Latte, and more. Some of these items are very specific and detailed. The Special Ability Cards, which can be used once per Level, do things like forcing another player to say the first letter of each card in his hand or allow the player to discard an Order Card from his hand. The Level Tokens are numbered from one to seven, indicating ever increasing degrees of difficulty that the players have to beat to proceed to the next Level. The Salesperson Tokens each have a smiling face on one side and a frowning face on the other. It should be noted that the cards and rules for Order Overload Café are given in French, German, and Spanish as well as English, meaning that the game could be used in the classroom as an aid to both teaching and learning another language.

Game set-up is simple. The Level Tokens are laid out in order, from one to seven. Each player receives a Special Ability Card and a Salesperson Token. The latter is placed on the table with the smiling face face-up.

At the start of the Level, the current active player draws a number of Order Cards equal to the players multiplied by the current Level. So, with four players, this would be four Order Cards in the first Level, eight Order Cards at Level Two, twelve Order Cards at Level Three, so and on. At the start of each Level, one player is the Order Taker. His task is to read each of the Order Cards that make up the current order out loud and as he does so, all of the other players have to memorise as many of them as they can. The Order Taker then shuffles the Order Cards in the current order and deals them out to all of the players. A player is allowed to look at his cards, but must keep them hidden from the other players. The player to left of the Order Taker becomes the Active Player, whilst the other players are the Checkers.

The meat of Order Overload Café is checking the order. The Active Player turns to the Checker on his left and asks him if he has one of the Order Cards that the Order Taker read out at the start of the turn. If the Checker does, he discards that Order Card from his hand. The turn now ends. If the Checker does not have the Order Card, the Active Player can ask the next Checker and so on and so on, until either a Checker does have it and can discard it, or no player has it. If no Checker has the Order Card, then the Active Player has failed! The Active Player turns his Salesperson Token over so that the frowning face is visible. The Active Player cannot be the Active Player again, but he can be a Checker. The Active Player can also call out an Order Card in his hand as well as asking the other Checkers.

The aim is for the players—both the Active Player and the Checkers—to discard all of the Order cards from their hand. It does not need to be all of the players, but one player per Level if there are two players, two players per Level if there are three or four players, and three players per Level if there are five or six players. If this happens, a Level is completed and its Level Token is turned over. All of the Order Cards are collected, shuffled, and then dealt out again according to the number of the new Level. Play continues like this until either the players manage to complete the seventh Level or all of the players’ Salesperson Tokens are turned over so that the frowning face is visible. If this occurs, the game is over, and the highest Level completed is the players’ final result.

In addition, the rules do include options for competitive play and for mixing the Order Cards from Order Overload Café—Order Overload: Burgers, Order Overload: Spiel23, and Order Overload: Insects. However, all three of these alternate versions are out of print and difficult to find. It would have nice if there was more variety in terms of the Special Ability Cards, but other than that, are no real issues with the game.

Physically, Order Overload Café is very nicely presented and packaged. The cards are of good quality and the cardboard pieces are nice and sturdy in the hand.

Order Overload Café is not difficult to play and its simple rules means that it is easy to teach and play with the family or with the gaming group. Although it is not difficult to play, it is challenging—or at least it becomes so. The first Level or so is a cake walk, but as one Level is completed and the next Level started, it becomes more and more of challenge as the size of the Order and the number of Order Cards that the players have to memorise increases. Not only that but the balance between the difficulty of the game and the number of the players remains constant, and play progresses, there is the constant feel of success as another Order Card is discarded and the players progress work towards completing a Level, knowing that at any moment, the Active Player might get an Order wrong and move everyone one step closer to failure. And failure is frustrating because you do want to beat each and every Level! Plus, unlike many a co-operative game, there is no alpha player attempting to steer everyone’s turn.

Order Overload Café is not a game that you are going to play again and again. Especially once you have beaten its top Level, but it is a good game to bring out occasionally or to play with casual or new players as the challenge is very quickly obvious and the rules are very, very easy to teach and the play is relying on memory not skill. Order Overload Café is a surprisingly good and challenging filler, best suited for the occasional play.

Friday Filler: Sea Salt & Paper

Imagine if you will, that instead of filling your aquarium with fish and crabs and sharks and penguins and boats and mermaids and light houses, you did exactly that, but the fish and crabs and sharks and penguins and boats and mermaids and light houses, were made out of Origami? This is almost, but not quite the theme to Sea Salt & Paper, a beautiful little card game in which every card is illustrated with Origami in delightfully soft pastel colours and uses its own set of folded paper icons to ensure that the game is accessible for any language and also colour blindness. It makes for a strikingly attractive game and although play at first looks simple, there is enough strategy and choice to keep the game being brought back to the table again and again. Published by Bombyx and Pandasaurus Games, Sea Salt & Paper is designed for two to four players, aged eight and over, and combines hand management, open drafting, pushing your luck, and set collection in a lovely little game. Although it did not win, it was on 2023 Spiel des Jahres Recommended list and like Scout before it, this is a little card game which is highly portable and easy to play at the coffee shop as it is at home.

Game set-up is simple. The deck is shuffled and two cards are drawn. These are placed face up to form two separate discard piles. None of the players begin the game with cards in their hand. On his turn, a player can either take a card from either discard pile or draw two from the deck, keep one, and place the other in the discard pile of his choice. He can play ‘Duo’ cards to trigger their effects and if the cards in his hand are work seven points or more, he can trigger the end of the round. In this way, game play is as simple as the set-up. What the cards do though, is where Sea Salt & Paper gets interesting.

Sea Salt & Paper consists of four card types: ‘Duo’ cards, ‘Collector’ cards, ‘Point Multiplier’ cards, and ‘Mermaid’ cards. ‘Duo’ cards are played together as pairs to enable a player to do a particular action. Thus, two ‘Crab’ Duo cards let a player go through one of the two discard piles, select a card, and add it to his hand; two ‘Boat’ Duo cards let a player have a second turn; two ‘Fish’ Duo cards let a player take the top card off the deck; and a combination of the ‘Shark’ and the ‘Swimmer’ enables him to steal a card from another player. A player can play as many ‘Duo’ cards he wants in his turn and is able to. Further, ‘Duo’ card combinations are worth a victory point for the pair, being played on the table.

‘Collector’ cards are the ‘Shell’, Octopus’, ‘Penguin’, and ‘Sailor’ cards. The more a player has of these in his hand, the more points he will score for each particular type of ‘Collector’ card. The ‘Point Multiplier’ cards score points for the other types of card and their icons in the game. ‘The Lighthouse’ scores points for the number of ‘Boat’ Duo cards a player has, whilst ‘The Shoal of Fish’ does the same for the number of ‘Fish’ Duo cards in a player’s hand. The other two ‘Point Multiplier’ cards are ‘The Penguin Colony’ and ‘The Captain’.

Lastly, the ‘Mermaid’ cards score a Victory Point for each of the cards of the single, most common colour in a player’s hand or on the table. Only one ‘Mermaid’ card is applied per colour, so a player might score three Victory Point s because he has a ‘Mermaid’ card and three cards in light pink, but he had two cards in light green and a ‘Mermaid’ card, he would score two Victory Points for those.

From initially having no cards in their hands, players draw cards and begin to build their hands of cards, looking for pairs of ‘Duo’ cards to play and give them an advantage, collecting sets of the ‘Shell’, Octopus’, ‘Penguin’, and ‘Sailor’ cards in conjunction with the ‘Point Multiplier’ cards. Throughout, each player is keeping track of his score. Victory Points will come from the ‘Duo’ cards played and from the ‘Collector’ cards and ‘Point Multiplier’ cards, which will remain hidden in their respective hands. When a player has accrued a score of seven or more Victory Points, he can call an end to the round. This is done in one of two ways. One is to simply call ‘Stop’ and the round will end and the players will add up their total Victory Points for the round. The other is to call out, ‘Last Chance’. This is done when a player thinks he has accrued more Victory Points than the other players and thus will win the round. In this case, the round does not end immediately, but every other player—that is, the one who did not declare, ‘Last Chance’—gets one more turn in an effort to get more Victory Points and potentially outscore the player who brought the round to a close.

Effectively, the player who shouted, ‘Last Chance’ is making a bet that he has outscored the other players. If he has, he scores Victory Points based for cards he has played and also a bonus for the most cards of a single colour he has, whilst the other players only score points for the bonus for the most cards of a single colour they have. However, if he loses, the player who shouted, ‘Last Chance’ only receives bonus for the most cards of a single colour he has, whilst the other players score Victory Points for the cards they played and the cards in their hands as normal.

Play continues like this over multiple rounds until one player has scored a combined total of between thirty and forty points, the target varying according to the number of players. The first player to do so wins the game. The other way to win the game is to have and place all four ‘Mermaid’ cards in the game on the table. When a player does this, he automatically wins the game. This rarely happens, so everyone will likely be amazed when it does.

There are really two issues with Sea Salt & Paper, but they are minor. One is that the card quality could have been slightly better and sturdier. The other is that the game is not that easy to learn because it has multiple icons on the different cards and it is a case the players needing to learn what the multiple different cards do.

Physically, Sea Salt & Paper is beautifully presented game. The artwork is a delight and the design on the cards is clear and simple. Notably, it is designed to be language independent and through the use of icons also suitable for any player who is colour blind. The rules are neatly explained in a small foldout sheet. There are reference cards for the rules and the colours—including their own icons for the colour blind—to make it easier to learn.

Sea Salt & Paper looks simple and its mechanisms are simple. However, there are some subtle choices to the play of the game and they really start with the dual discard piles. The players can see what is on the top of the two discard piles, so they can see what is drawn from each pile and going into everyone’s hands. This can give them some indication of what each player might doing, such as looking for particular ‘Duo’ cards or creating a set of ‘Collector’ cards. When a player has a ‘Duo’ card in his hand, playing it at the right time can really give him an advantage. For example, using the ‘Shark’ and ‘Swimmer’ ‘Duo’ card combination to steal a card from another player in the hope of grabbing the one the targeted player has just drawn which you need or two ‘Crab’ Duo cards to go through a discard pile looking for that card you know is there, but which has since been covered up by discarded cards… Which can be all the more satisfying if a player has drawn two cards from the top of the deck and they are both useful, but of course, one of them has to be discarded. Of course, drawing from the top of the deck keeps a player’s objectives a secret from his rivals.

So, there are some pleasing little nuances to Sea Salt & Paper, which combined with the multiple means of scoring, means that the game can be enjoyed by casual players and experienced players alike. Once the players have grasped what all of the icons mean and do in the game, Sea Salt & Paper plays fairly quickly.

Sea Salt & Paper is a lovely looking game that plays as good as it looks and its looks are good enough to attract players of any experience to play it.

Friday Filler: Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game

First broadcast six decades ago, Thunderbirds is a classic of British children’s television, combining the advanced puppetry of ‘Supermarionation’ with superb scale models and special effects. The result still stands up today as exciting television with great music and amazing opening credits. The series told of the daring missions to save life and limb conducted by International Rescue, a secret non-government organisation dedicated to rescuing those that governments cannot. It is equipped with a fleet of advanced vehicles, each with Thunderbird call sign, enabling its operatives to conduct air, land, sea, and space missions from its secret base on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy leads International Rescue, but it is his sons that conduct the missions, supported by Brains, who develops and builds new vehicles, and Lady Penelope, the organisation’s London ‘secret’ agent. Opposing International Rescue is the criminal and terrorist, The Hood, who uses disguises and constantly plots to steal International Rescue’s technological secrets and make a fortune by selling them to the criminal underworld.

The Gerry Anderson television series has been the subject of previous board games, most notably, Thunderbirds, designed by Matt Leacock and published by Modiphius Entertainment in 2015. The latest game based on the series is the card game, Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game, published by YAY Games. Designed to be played by two to six players, aged ten and up, it is a co-operative game in which the players attempt to complete seven missions. Each of the seven is based on a classic episode—‘End of the Road’, ‘Pit of Peril’, ‘30 Minutes After Noon’, ‘Trapped in the Sky’’, Vault of Death’, ‘Terror in New York City’, and ‘The Impostors’—and the game can be played through in between twenty and forty minutes, depending upon the difficulty and length of a mission. In the game, each player takes turns playing the role of Jeff Tracy, leader of International Resource, who will marshal four types of resource—‘Team Spirit’, ‘Fuel’, Tech’, and ‘Knowledge’—that will get the members of International Rescue on a Journey to the Danger Zone where they can conduct the rescue. If the players get both the right members of International Rescue and the right resources to the right places, they can complete a mission and win the game!

Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game consists of several sets of cards. The first are the Danger Zone cards. There are three of these per mission and each shows which resources and character is needed to complete that part of the mission. The Journey cards represents the steps needed to get to the mission, represented by the Danger Zone cards and have their own requirements in terms of resources. The Resource cards show a mix of Resource types, either three or all four, and their number. The Tracy Island cards have countdowns on them of various lengths, from ten to four turns, and are used to set the game’s difficulty, ten being the easiest, , four being the hardest. There are also reference cards for the various Actions that the characters can take, Tokens to represent each character, Journey Tokens to increase the difficulty a bit more, a Countdown Marker to use on the Tracy Island cards, and Tokens used to indicate that a resource has been successfully supplied.

To set up a mission, its three Mission cards are placed in a row and three Journey cards, either those for the mission or three random, are laid out in a row below the Mission cards. A Journey Token is placed on each Journey card, either a resource or The Hood. The Journey Token increases the number of Resources needed to complete the Journey card, whilst the presence of The Hood reduces the number of Resources the players can play. Each of the three Mission cards has an associated character on it, and the Token for each is placed below the corresponding Mission card and Journey card, along with another Journey Token.

Each round, the players each has a hand of three Resource cards. One player is designated to take the role of Jeff Tracy and he will ask the other players to supply him with resources to fulfil one of the Resource requirements, first on the Journey cards, and then on the Mission cards. Each player selects a card from his hand and places it face down. The Jeff Tracy player selects two of these face down Resource cards. If the total number of the resources on the Resource cards selected match the number on the designated Journey card or Mission card—adjusted for the Journey Token or The Hood on the Journey card—then the action succeeds and the Jeff Tracy player can place a Success Token on that Resource. If the players have been unable to supply enough Resources, the Jeff Tracy player can swap one of the Resource cards he choose, with a Resource card of his own. If the Jeff Tracy player cannot match the number of Resources indicated on the Journey card or Resource card, the action fails, the Countdown Marker is moved down one space on the Tracy Island card.

The round ends and all cards played are discarded. Players draw back up to three Resource cards, except the Jeff Tracy player if he swapped one of his Resource cards. In this case, he starts the next round with two Resource cards. The Jeff Tracy token is passed to the next player and the new round begins.

The aim is move all three Character Tokens for a mission through the Journey card and onto the Mission Card. This is done by fulfilling all of the Resource requirements for the Journey card. Once all three Character Tokens have been moved from their respective Journey cards to the Mission cards, play continues in the same fashion until either all of the Resource requirements for each Mission card has been fulfilled and the Mission completed with a successful rescue, or the Countdown Marker runs out of space on the Tracy Island card, in which case, International Rescue has failed to complete the mission and the players have lost the game.

Initially, the Jeff Tracy player will have no real idea as to what Resources to ask for, so the players do not know which of the Resource cards in their hands to play with any certainty. However, once a particular Resource on a Journey card or a Mission card, the choices will begin to tighten and a player can husband his Resource cards and perhaps save particular cards for later rounds. Should the Jeff Tracy player swap a card to fulfil a Resource requirement, then the Jeff Tracy player on the next round will know one of the cards that player has a holdover from the previous round. In general, though, because Resource cards are kept hidden in each player’s hand, there is an element of uncertainty to play, which will of course, grow and grow as the players get closer to completing a Mission and the Countdown Marker slides down Tracy Island. On side effect of keeping the Resource cards hidden, is that there is no ‘Alpha’ player, no one player ‘suggesting’ the best course of action for everyone. The revolving role of Jeff Tracy enforces that too because it puts a different person in charge from round to round.

Beyond the core game, Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game adds options that increase both theme and complexity. These primarily give more options for the Jeff Tracy player. If the players manage to supply sufficient Resources on a turn, he has an extra pair of options. One is to ‘Prepare Pod and Equipment’, the other is to provide ‘Mission Support’. The ‘Prepare Pod and Equipment’ action is necessary because all of the six missions beyond the beginning mission, ‘End of the Road’, have Pods and Equipment. The Pods hold the special vehicles built by Brains and are transported by Thunderbird 2 piloted by Virgil Tracy. For example, the ‘Pit of Peril’ mission requires ‘The Mole’ and ‘Recovery Vehicles’, and the Equipment includes ‘Explosives’. What it means is the players have layers of cards each with their own Resource requirements, adding to demands of play and lengthening game play, but at the same time adding theme too.

‘Mission Support’ is carried out by bringing another character and his token into play, which is done by playing Resource card showing that character. These cannot be the characters actually on the mission, and provide the players with an advantageous action. For example, Lady Penelope has ‘Inside Information’ that lets the Jeff Tracy player reveal a third Resource card in play and use that instead of the one he has already selected, whilst Scott Tracy, as ‘Team Leader’, can use the Team Spirit Resource on one Resource card as the Knowledge Resource on another, and vice versa. The ‘Mission Support’ from any one character can only be used twice before he needs to be reactivated again. The Jeff Tracy player can conduct multiple ‘Mission Support’ actions.

Physically, Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game is well presented. The cards are of good stock and the tokens of sturdy cardboard. The rules leaflet is clearly laid out and easy to read. All three—especially the cards—are illustrated with photographs from the television series, and the particular episodes depicted in the seven Mission cards.

Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game is a serviceable card game that as a co-operative game interestingly introduces mechanics that avoid the ‘alpha player’ problem found in many co-operative games. As a game itself, it is perfectly playable, but ultimately, Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game really is a game for Thunderbirds fans and they are really going to get the most out of it.

Friday Filler: Scout

You have been put in charge of the circus and are determined to put on the best series of acts and performers possible in order to wow the audience and make your circus the best. However, the running order has already been set, but you might be able to pull the performers you have out of that order knowing that they will outperform the previous act directed by a rival circus. If that is not possible, then you can scout the previous act and hire its best performer to join your circus, slotting into the running order you already have. Sometimes, you can even scout the previous act, hire its best performer, slot them into your running order, and have them perform immediately to really outdo the previous act. Do all of that enough times, and your circus will undoubtedly be the best!

This is the set-up for Scout, a quick-playing card game from Oink Games. Like nearly all of the Japanese publisher’s games, the game is small, tightly packaged, and comes with simple rules, but delivers terrific game play. The game was a Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2022 and won the Origins Award for Best Card Game in 2023. It is designed for two to five players, aged nine and up, and can be played in about twenty minutes. It is also easy to teach, plays quickly, and it can be enjoyed by the casual gamer as much as the veteran. In fact, its simplicity makes it a good family game whilst still providing a challenge for the experienced gamer. Plus, it is incredibly portable. That said, its theme is about as thick as the canvas on a worn circus tent, but then every card is named, such as ‘Anthony the Clown’ or ‘Jennifer the Bicyclist’. So, there is a personal touch to the game—just about.

Scout consists of forty-five cards, twenty-three Scout Tokens, thirty Score Tokens, five ‘Scout & Show’ Tokens, a Starting Player Marker, and a Game Manual. The forty-five, brightly coloured cards are numbered from one to ten, not once, but twice—at the top or bottom of the cards. In fact, the cards do not have a top or a bottom as such, because they are intended to be played with one number at the top. Notably, the numbers at either end of a card are never the same. This is important because a player can choose which way a card is orientated and thus which number is on display at certain points in the game. The game consists of a number of rounds equal to the number of players. Once the round have been completed, the player with the highest score is the winner.

The game’s key mechanics are ‘Hand Management’ and ‘Ladder Climbing’. Unlike other card games, Scout limits the degree of hand management a player can conduct—adding or playing cards in his hand, but not arranging the order of the card. ‘Ladder Climbing’ has the players attempting to play better cards or sets of cards than those currently on the table. In Scout, this is sets of the same value or runs of sequential number.

At the start of the round, adjustments are made for the number of players and the cards are shuffled and dealt out so that everyone has a hand the same size. A player also receives a ‘Scout & Show’ Token. Here appears the first wrinkle in the play of Scout. When a player receives his hand, he looks at it in order to see the numbers at the top or the bottom. Having done so, he choses one or the other. What he cannot do is change the order of the cards in his hand. The order will not change throughout the whole of the round unless he either plays cards or adds a card to his hand. This has two effects. It constrains what he can play, but it also gives him the foundation of something he can build upon to create a better hand and hopefully outscore his rivals.

On a turn, a player has a choice of three actions— ‘Show’, ‘Scout’, or ‘Scout & Show’—of which he must do one. To ‘Show’, he plays a set or run of cards. A set is multiple cards of the same number, whilst a run is a sequential series, but when played that set or run must be better than the cards in play on the table. If this replaces the current set or run of cards on the table, the player picks them up and adds them to his score pile. To ‘Scout’, the player takes one card from those on the table, which come from either end rather than the middle and adds it to his hand. When he does so, it can be added to anywhere in his hand and with either number. With careful or lucky choice of a card from a ‘Scout’ action, a player can begin to build a bigger set or run of cards in his hand that will hopefully be better than that on the table in another turn. A ‘Scout’ action also scores a ‘Scout Token’ for the player who played the current set or run of cards on the table. The ‘Scout & Show’ combines both actions and is the most powerful action in the game. Each player begins a round with a ‘Scout & Show Token’ which is turned in once a player decides to do a ‘Scout & Show’ action. Once handed in, a player cannot do another ‘Scout & Show’ action, so it is a one-use action.

Play continues until either a player has played all of the cards in his hand or a player plays a high enough set or run that no-one else can do anything else except the ‘Scout’ action and play passes back to the player who played that set or run. Each player determines his score for the round. This is equal to the number of cards in his score pile and ‘Scout Tokens’ he earned in the round, minus the number of cards in his hand. The player who played the last set or run does not have to deduct points for the cards in his hand. Play continues like this until a number of rounds equal to the number of players have been completed.

Scout is simple to play, but it has a surprising amount of depth and requires a bit more thought than at first glance. The inability to rearrange a player’s hand is frustrating, but it presents a player with a challenge as he is forced to ‘Scout’ over and over in search of the right cards that will enable him to create the best set or run that he can. The double and differently numbered cards make this less of a challenge and add some flexibility in the choices available to the players. Also, as a round progresses and better and higher sets and runs are played, the players will potentially—as long as they are on the end of a set or run—have access to the better and higher cards that they need and can acquire via a ‘Scout’ action. Playing a good set or run early on in the game can be devastating as the other players are likely to be unable to outdo it with the hands they have, forcing them to ‘Scout’, and if they all ‘Scout’, the round is over, forcing them to score negative points because they have been unable to play cards from their hands. However, the right card from a ‘Scout’ action or the right card and then cards played with the ‘Scout & Show’ action can be devastating when done at the right time. Plus, a player can benefit when it is not his turn, because if another player does the ‘Scout’ action and takes from the set or run of cards he played, he scores points for doing nothing. So, there is balance between the luck of the cards a player begins a round with and the choices he makes as round progresses.

Where Scout suffers is in the number of players. It is designed for two to five players, but at two players, the players do very little more than ‘Scout & Show’ actions most of the time. It is not as engrossing or as challenging as games played with more participants. It is thus better with three players, but with four or five, it becomes a great game. Then there is the theme, which is really neither here nor there.

Physically, Scout is, for the most part, well presented. The card quality is decent, but it is definitely worth sleeving the cards for repeated play. The Scout Tokens, Score Tokens, and ‘Scout & Show’ Tokens, plus the Starting Player Marker are all bright and cheerful and on good stock cardboard. The rulebook though, is a bit small and a bit flimsy.

Scout is great game. It would be an almost perfect game were it good to play with two players. It is not, so it is merely great. Easy to learn, easy to play, challenging enough to win at its play length, and easy to transport, Scout is a great addition to any games collection and a great go to filler game.

Friday Filler: Something Wild!

Something Wild! The Card Game of Character Combos! is actually a whole family of card games published by Funko Games, all of which share the same simple mechanics, but each of which involves a different Intellect property. So, there are versions of Something Wild! devoted to Disney’s Aladdin, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas, Dr. Seuss, Marvel Spiderman, Star Wars’ Boba Fett, Disney’s Steamboat Willy. Thus there is a version of Something Wild! for just about everyone and in each case, the version of the game, it includes a miniature Funko Pop figure. So, for example, in the Indiana Jones version—a new addition in 2023—the game includes a figure of that character. The fun thing is, that the various versions of Something Wild! are compatible with each other, and two or more sets can be combined for both more players and variation in theme. Something Wild! The Card Game of Character Combos! is designed for two to four players, aged six and above, and can be played in fifteen minutes or so.

Something Wild! consists of forty-five Character Cards, ten Power Cards, a Funko Pop! mini-figure, and the rules sheet. For the Indiana Jones version of Something Wild! The Card Game of Character Combos! the mini-Funko Pop figure is of Indiana Jones and all of the characters on the Character Cards come from the Indiana Jones franchise—in particular from Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade, but not from Crystal Skull. The characters on the numbered cards include Marcus Brody, Marion Ravenwood, Indiana Jones, Short Round, Major Toht, Sallah El-Kahir, Captain Katanga, Elsa Schneider, and Henry Jones, Sr. The Character Cards are divided into five colour suits, numbered between one and nine, and the characters are the same on each number across the five suits. The ten Power Cards are also divided into five colours. Power Cards give a player an advantage or ability in play. For example, a Power Card might allow six cards to be played as any colour or swap a card a player in play with a card in play belonging to another player.

The aim in Something Wild! is to score or win three Power Cards. The first player to do wins the game. To win a Power Card, a player must create a set or run of cards. A set is three cards of any colour with the same number. A run is three cards of the same colour with numbers in order. This is done one card at a time and when a set or run is formed, the player takes the Power Card and discards the cards played.

Play of Something Wild! is simple. At the start of the game, each player receives a hand of three Character Cards and a single Power Card is played face up in the centre of the table. On his turn, a player draws a Character Card and adds it to his hand, then places a Character Card down in front of him on the table. If the colour of the Character Card played matches the colour of the Power Card currently, the player gets to take the Funko Pop! mini-figure. When a player has the Funko Pop! mini-figure in front of him, he can use the ability of a Power Card he has already in front of him or the ability of the Power Card face up on the table in the centre of the table. If a player has either a set or run of cards in front of him, then he can take the Power Card on the table.

Physically, Something Wild! The Card Game of Character Combos! is a solidly presented card game. Both the Character Cards and Power Cards are done in bright, solid colours and the rules sheet is easy to read. The Character Cards and Power Cards are language independent, whereas the rules are not. The rules are easy to read and understand, but younger players will need a hand. Of course, the Funko Pop! mini-figure is cute.

Something Wild! The Card Game of Character Combos! is not a difficult game to play and being aimed at players aged six and up, it is not a difficult game to teach. The latter is likely necessary because the rules are likely to be too difficult to read and understand for the six-year-old player. Another issue is that the game’s cards are language independent and so reference needs to be made to the rules to understand how each Power Card works. That is, until either the players have remembered or been successfully taught what each does. With younger players then, Something Wild! will require some supervision by older or adult players—at least initially.

In addition, whilst Something Wild! is a decent family game—especially if the edition they are playing has a Funko Pop! mini-figure that everyone likes—it actually gets better with the addition of a second set. This gives the players the chance to take control of two—or more—Funko Pop! mini-figures, as well as giving them a wider range of Power Cards, though this of course, means learning what the extra Power Cards do.

Something Wild! The Card Game of Character Combos! is simple, clean, and fast-playing. There is a little bit of ‘take that’ as players vie to take or keep control of the Funko Pop! mini-figure, but it is by no means a vicious game and with a fifteen-minute playing time, it never outstays its welcome. Overall, Something Wild! The Card Game of Character Combos! is a solid family card, easy to teach and easy to play, with some nice variations in its Power Cards to keep it interesting, but still light.

Friday Filler: Fluxx Remixx

It seems amazing that Fluxx is over a quarter of a century old. The 1999 Mensa Select Winner is the perfect filler game. It is simple to play, but not easy to win. It is easy to learn and not too difficult to master. The difficulty though comes in the changes that will occur through play, because Fluxx is a card game in which its very nature can change from one player’s turn to the next. The number of cards a player can hold can change. The number of cards a player can play can change. The winning conditions can change. Random things will occur—cards will come back into play, cards will be swapped, and so on. The state of the game is literally in ‘fluxx’ and to win, a player must adapt to the changes and make the best use of the current rules and the cards in his hand on any one turn. Published by Looney Labs, Fluxx has proven to be a perennially popular game as well as one that served as the basis for a large number of differently themed variations. From science editions like Anatomy Fluxx, Astronmy Fluxx, and Chemistry Fluxx to Science Fiction such as Doctor Who Fluxx, Firefly Fluxx, and Star Trek Fluxx. With so many versions of the game available, there should be a version for just about everyone.

The core gameplay is simple. On his turn, a player draws one card and plays one card. His aim is to have two cards called Keepers in play, in front of him, which match the Keepers mentioned on the Goal card currently in play. For example, the ‘Squishy Chocolate’ Goal requires the ‘Sun’ and ‘Chocolate’ Keepers to be in front of a player for him to win, whilst the ‘Brain (No TV)’ Goal needs the player to have the ‘Brain’ Keeper in front of him and nobody to have the ‘TV’ Goal in front of them. Fluxx being as old as it is means that the game has become familiar to many players. An old standby that is easily remembered and brought to play. Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition is designed not to be familiar. Its game play remains the same as the original 1997 version, but the Keepers have been reimagined to provide the players with a whole new set of unfamiliar challenges as well as a whole new rule and set of cards. Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition is designed to be played by two to six players, aged eight and up, with a game lasting between five and thirty minutes. The game consists of one hundred cards, divided into five types. These are New Rule cards, Action cards, Keeper cards, Goal cards, and the new Surprise cards. All five card types are clearly designed, colour-coded by type, and easy to understand in play. Everything on the double-sided rules sheet is boldly presented and includes not just an ‘Exec Summary’ of what the game is, but also examples of a game in play and how the cards interact. Anyone who has played Fluxx before will be able to open up Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition and begin play with very little preparation. Anyone unfamiliar with Fluxx will really only need five minutes to read through and prepare the game for play.

The core card for the game is the ‘Basic Rules’. This tells the players to draw one card and play one card each turn. The yellow New Rule cards either replace a New Rule card in play or add a New Rule card to play. They include ‘Draw 2’, which changes the number of cards each player draws on his turn; ‘Play All’ means that every player has to play all of the cards in his hand on a turn; and ‘Card Transfusion’ enables every player to discard as many cards from his hand as he wants to and draw as many cards as he discarded. The blue coloured Action cards provide single actions a player can play and do on his turn. For example, ‘Draw 3, Play 2 of Them’ means that the player draws three cards, chooses two of them to play, and discards the third; ‘Trade Hands’ allows a player to swap his hand of cards with that of another player; and ‘Taskmaster’, which instructs the player to draw a number of cards equal to the number of player and assign one to each player face down, including himself. The players then reveal and play these cards in turn. The green Keeper cards include Dreams, Love, Peace, Chocolate, Cookies, Music, Moon, and more. The pink Goal cards are the winning conditions for the game. When there is one on the table, all of the players are either working to play Keeper which match the Goal or change the Goal to match the Keepers they have in play in front of them. The Keepers, though, are the biggest change in the new version of Fluxx. They give the players new winning objectives, ones different from the original version of the game, but still using the familiar Keepers. For example, ‘The Wedding’ Goal requires ‘Love’ and ‘The Party’ Keepers to win; ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ Goal requires ‘Music’ and ‘The Moon’ Keepers to win; and ‘All You Need is Love’ Goal requires ‘Love’ and no other Keepers in front of a player to win.

In addition, Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition adds a new card type. This is the Surprise card. Coloured purple, they are perhaps one of the most complex card types introduced to the game. This is because unlike the other four card types in the game, a Surprise card has not one play condition, but three! This is because a Surprise card can be played ‘Out of Turn’, ‘During your Turn’, and ‘At Any Time’. For example, if played ‘Out of Turn’, the ‘Cancelled Plans’ card forces a player to discard the Goal he just played, including if playing the Goal would mean he would win the game. If played ‘During your Turn’, they force the current Goal to be discarded and the other players to discard a Goal or other card in their hand. If played ‘At Any Time’, it cancels the effect of another Surprise as it is played. The ‘At Any Time’ option is common to all four Surprise cards in FFluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition. The Surprise cards increase the interaction between the players in a game already known for its high interaction between the players. Yet the relative complexity of the Surprise cards may mean that they are not suited for play by the younger audience for this game, but this should be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis. That said, if the Surprise cards are removed, Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition still plays as Fluxx.

If there is an issue with Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition, it is that the cards do refer to a card type not actually present in this version—the Creeper. Originally introduced in Zombie Fluxx in 2007, this card type sits in front of a player and prevents him from winning, very likely increasing the length of game play. Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition is a return to the original version of Fluxx, so the Creeper really does not warrant inclusion in its deck of cards. Mention of them here is likely to be confusing. On the other hand, mention of them is a nod to the fact that like many of the Fluxx sets, Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition can be integrated with many of the Fluxx variants.

In play, Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition is random, chaotic, and frustrating, but nevertheless. It is all but impossible to plan from one turn to the next as the state and nature of the rules fluctuate and change. A player can go from almost winning to having to start again, not necessarily on his turn, but on the turns of the other players. Then again, a player can find himself the winner as the rule changes, cards have to be played, forcing the play of a Goal and Keeper in just the right combination. The new Surprise cards add a new element of interaction and complexity, but more of the former than the latter as they add to the chaos of play. Games can be really quick. A winner could be lucky in the very first round, but a typical game will last no more than twenty minutes. (That said, I have played in games that have lasted twice as long!)

Physically, Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition is clearly and tidily presented. The Fluxx format is tried and tested and this variant is no exception. The card stock is not as glossy as in previous variants and it might be an idea to sleeve this one.

The original Fluxx did not have a theme and neither does Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition. Or rather, it does and it is a subtle one. The clue is in the title, Fluxx Remix because its theme is music and all of the goals are song titles. Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition is as familiar and as fun as Fluxx was in 1997, simple to play, but still chaotic and enjoyably frustrating, with the addition of a new if quiet theme and a new card type for more interaction. Fluxx has always been a great filler game, Fluxx Remixx – Extra Chaos Edition is no exception.

Friday Filler: Dune: Betrayal

The social deduction game drawn from the parlour game, Murder in the Dark and the classic Russian game, Mafia, has become a fixed staple and genre of the board gaming hobby. This type of game is typically played between two teams, one hidden, one not. The smaller hidden team consist of the murderers or the traitors, whilst the larger team—amongst which the smaller team hides—consist of their victims, the ones they are going to betray or murder. It is up to the larger team to identify the murderers or traitors, as the latter try to keep their identities hidden whilst also undermining or murdering the members of the larger group. The genre reached its peak with the release in 2010 of Indie Boards and Cards’ The Resistance: A Game of Secret Identities, Deduction, and Deception, and Breaking Games’ Secret Hitler in 2016. Although, there were many releases in the genre, it is not as popular as it once was, however, this does not mean that the occasional entry in the genre is being released, such as Dune: Betrayal from Gale Force Nine.

Dune: Betrayal is a social deduction game based on the Dune series of novels by Frank Herbert and the more recent film directed by Denis Villeneuve. Both universe and story of Dune are absolutely perfect for social deduction, especially one involving betrayal as the main characters in the book are betrayed from within and all but destroyed by a rival noble house. Designed for between four and eight players, aged fourteen and up, Dune: Betrayal casts the players as Nobles and Fighters of honourable House Atreides and heartless House Harkonnen. House Atreides has been awarded the fiefdom of Arrakis by the Emperor, but House Harkonnen, in connivance with the Emperor, is planning to retake and destroy House Atreides in the process. Dune: Betrayal is game of secret identities in which House Harkonnen is planning to attack House Atreides. If House Harkonnen can identify the members of House Atreides, it will greatly help in its attack and so win the game for the House Harkonnen team, but if House Atreides can identify the members of House Harkonnen, it will greatly aid in its defence and so win the game for the House Atreides team.

The game consists of a small Scoring Board, which tracks both the seesaw movement of the scoring to House Harkonnen and back again to House Atreides, and so on, five different sets of Cards, and nine tokens. The different sets of Cards consist of eight Identity Cards (four Atreides and four Harkonnen), twenty-four 24 Trait Cards (eight Atreides, eight Harkonnen, and eight Fighter), sixteen Target Cards (eight Attack and eight Defend), thirty Action Cards, and eight Reference Cards. Each Identity Card gives the character’s name, rank—noble or fighter, three scoring Sigils, and Special Attribute. The Sigils are Atreides, Harkonnen, All Nobles, All Fighters, and All Players. The core characters for the four-player game are Baron Harkonnen (Harkonnen Noble), Trooper (Harkonnen Fighter), Duke Leto Atreides (Atreides Noble), and Duncan Idaho (Atreides Fighter). Expanding the game from five to eight players adds more Nobles and Fighters from each side, as well as more characters from Dune.

The Trait Cards are marked Atreides, Harkonnen, or Fighter. Each player will have two in play, matching the identity of his character. Thus, Duke Leto Atreides will have the Atreides and Noble Trait Cards, whereas the Harkonnen Fighter has the Harkonnen and Fighter trait Cards. The Attack and Defend are used to target another player. Ideally, Attack Cards should be played on enemies as this will lose a player points. The Action Cards vary in effect, but all are inspired by Dune and illustrated with stills from the film. Each is marked with a Sigil matching those on the Identity Cards— Atreides, Harkonnen, All Nobles, All Fighters, and All Players. Action Cards can be played immediately, as interrupts against other Action Card, and in the first, second, or either of the two Targeting rounds. For example, the ‘Ornithopter Escape’ Card is marked with an All Fighters Sigil and acts as an interrupt to prevent another player targeting you, forcing him to either target another player or disCard the Action Card played. The ‘Harkonnen Probe Ship’ Card has the Harkonnen Sigil and enables the player to view another player’s Trait Card. ‘Mind Breaker’ has the Atreides Sigil and enables a player to view another player’s Trait if it is Shielded. Any player can draw and use an Action Card, but if the Sigil on the Action Card matches a Sigil on either of a player’s Trait Cards, they will score him points at the end of the game. However, if a player picks Action Cards based on Sigil too explicitly, then that may possibly indicate his Trait Cards and thus his identity for the other players.

At the beginning of the game, each player receives an Identity Card and Trait Cards for the Identity. These are placed face down. The identity is kept secret. Three Action Cards are drawn and placed in the middle of the table. As is standard in social deduction games, some information is initially revealed to the players, or in this case, Baron Harkonnen, who starts the game knowing who the Harkonnen Fighters are and thus who the Atreides characters are—but not which of them is the Noble or the Fighter.

Dune: Betrayal is played out in six rounds—three Action rounds, two Targeting rounds, and one Battle round. In the Action rounds, the players take it in turns selecting and playing Action Cards. The aim here is play them on the Traits of the other players and in the process reveal them, thus giving clues as to a player’s Identity. Once one player has learned a player’s Trait, that Trait Card is turned sideways to indicate that it is Shielded. A Shielded Trait can only be viewed by the ‘Mind Breaker’ Action Card. Obviously, a player will be able to learn whether the targeted player is a Fighter or a Noble, or an Atreides or Harkonnen. In addition, certain Action Cards, ‘Atreides Sigil’ and ‘Master of Assassins’, enable a player to target rival players with two types of tokens—Atreides Sigil and Assassin Tokens. Atreides Sigil Token are played on your house to protect it, Assassin Tokens on a rival player to attack it. Points scored at the end of the game for playing the Tokens varies and depends upon whether the player is Harkonnen or Atreides.

In the two Targeting rounds, players take it in turns to play their Attack and Defend cards. These are placed face down on a rival player’s Identity Card. The aim here is for the player to attack his enemies as they will lose points—especially Nobles, and Atreides Nobles in particular. In the Battle round, Identities are revealed and points are scored for Attack and Defend Cards, Tokens, and Action Cards. The team with the greatest number of points wins.

Physically, Dune: Betrayal is reasonably well presented. The rules are clearly written with explanations of how the game should be played and examples of the scoring system at the end of the game. The latter is needed as it is the most complex part of the game. Good use is made of illustrations from the film to match the Action Cards and give Dune: Betrayal much of its flavour and feel. Even then that flavour and feel is not very much. The card stock is slightly thin and may not stand up to too much handling without card sleeves.

Throughout the rules for Dune: Betrayal there are strategy notes, which primarily encourage the players to discuss with each other what they will have discovered, not necessarily explicitly or even truthfully! Thus they can lie. Plus, of course, the players do need to keep an eye on what their rivals are doing as that will potentially give them clues too. However, the game and its play feels underwhelming, especially in relation to Dune as a setting, with the keeping of Identities secret meaning that the players can only reference the characters in the film in an oblique way rather than fully roleplaying them. A much longer, and more detailed game would allow for that, most obviously with the classic Dune board game published in by Avalon Hill in 1979 and again by Gale Force Nine in 2019. Nor do any of the characters have any real special abilities that might have again added some flavour or feel to the game. Although play is quick, it does not feel it, and the play and thus the social interaction of the game is not working with very much—the Traits and the Action Cards played—in an attempt to reveal very little. So there is little for the players to build on.

There is still scope for a good social deductive game based on Dune, but unfortunately, Dune: Betrayal is not it. It is not interesting enough and it does not make interesting use of the Dune franchise. There are still good social deductive games available—the aforementioned The Resistance and Killing Hitler—are excellent examples and still very playable. There is even another game from Indie Boards and Cards, Coup, published in 2012, which might better have suited the Dune universe, certainly its artwork was reminiscent of Dune as a setting. Dune: Betrayal is at best, a game for the Dune fan to try, but even then, they should be looking at the more recent reprint of Dune and then Dune: Imperium, for a better, more thematic and interesting play experience.