Ohanami

Ohanami

Pandasaurus Games  |  BGG  

D: Steffen Benndorf
A: Christian Opperer
P: NSV, Pandasaurus Games
2-4 players  20 min.  ages 8+  MSRP $15
5 minutes to learn
Written by: Doug Richardson


text-the concept

Cherry blossom season is about to blanket Zen gardens with their resplendent wonder. Water, vegetation, stones, and sakura trees must be placed in perfect harmony in order to become a Master Gardener.

Over three rounds you will carefully select or reject the elements for your next garden creation. Do you have the skills to craft the best Zen garden?

text-the components

Ohanami is played with a deck of 120 cards, numbered from 1 to 120. Each card depicts one of four elements: water (blue), plants (green), stones (grey), or cherry blossoms (pink).To help score your game, a handy pad of scoresheets is included.

text-the mechanics

Ohanami is a card drafting and set collecting game. Over three rounds, players will hope to be the most masterful gardener by drafting and scoring sets of elements by skillfully adding these to their three gardens. 

Each round starts by dealing ten cards to each player. Then players select two cards to keep for their gardens.

Once you’ve chosen two cards, you will pass the remaining cards on to the next player. Before you look at any new cards, all players will reveal the two cards they’ve selected, and place them into one of three gardens or discard them.

These two cards may go into the same garden or into  separate gardens. Either way, you’ll only have three gardens for the entire game. And you’ll find the cards you place define the limits of your gardens.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’ve selected the blue 68 and the green 75. You decide to put this water feature and that bit of shrubbery into the same garden. From now on, only cards numbered higher than 75, or lower than 68 may be put in this garden. 

In other words, you may never place a card with a number that falls between two other cards into a garden. Such a card will have to go into one of your other gardens, or be discarded from the game.

So, on one hand, you’ll be selecting cards based on their number to fit into your gardens. BUT, you’ll also choose cards to play based on how each color group scores.

At the end of the first round, only the blue water feature cards will score.  Count the total number of blue cards in your gardens and earn 3 points for each of them. None of your other cards will score in round one.

In round two, both your blue water cards, and your green plant cards will score. Blue will again earn you 3 points apiece. Green will be worth 4 points each. Note: you are scoring for all the blue and all the green in your gardens, not just the cards you added during this round.

At the end of round three, all your cards will score one more time. Blue 3 points and green 4. Now your grey stone cards will score, and you’ll get 7 points for each of them.  

Finally, your pink cherry blossom cards will score.

If you have one lone pink card, you’ll get 1 point. Two pink cards get you 3 points, 3 pink cards are worth 6 points (1 + 2 + 3 = 6, etc.)…all  the way up to 120 points for 15 or more pink cards.

So, let’s review. Draft two cards each turn. Choose to either fit them into one of your three gardens or discard them. Draft and pass through ten cards per hand over three rounds. Score the relevant elements of your growing garden each round. Highest score wins and becomes the Master Gardener!

text-apart

First, some context, in Japan a Hanami is a planned excursion, a sort of picnic and stroll under the blossoming cherry trees. Life slows, and time is taken to appreciate the beauty of rock and water, bush and flowering trees.

People use Zen gardens to disentangle themselves from the cares of everyday life, and engage with nature. In the same way, Ohanami the game allows us to engage with the nature of play itself.

When we sit down to play any tabletop game, we accept the fact that we are fooling ourselves. We haven’t really become kings commanding great armies, or builders erecting a city, or farmers growing the best crops. We are merely players, abiding by a set of rules, and using simple items of paper and plastic and wood to depict our imaginary world.

All games are abstractions. Some games refuse to put on airs. What is the theme of checkers?  Doesn’t matter; just capture your opponent’s pieces and win.

Some games go to elaborate ends to try and convince you of their made-up “reality”. These are usually found in gigantic boxes crammed with elaborate carved pieces and fantastic terrain. And generally with a fantastic price attached.

By comparison, you might think Ohanami isn’t even trying. 120 cards and a scorepad? Really? Well, hold on, I think Ohanami is one of the most thematic games around.

Who are we? Clearly, we are gardeners, assigned the task of creating three Zen gardens. The pieces we choose for these gardens must both fit (numerically) and add up to a pleasing whole.

Each turn you sort through the goods on offer and select two candidates to take back to your workshop.  Hopefully, you’ve chosen well and can fit these new pieces into your expanding gardens.

Of course, you’ll keep an eye on what your rivals are doing. No sense leaving all the choicest pieces to them! Which means you view each small decision with both an eye toward your gardens, and a glance over the fence at what is happening next door.

Because your concern is with both the numbers on the cards and the types of landscape they represent, both the mathematical and aesthetic parts of your brain are involved in every decision. In a very simple way, this mimics why people enjoy zen gardens: engagement.

Because the rules are brief, you are playing within moments. Even with your first choices, you are setting the constraints of your three little worlds. In a flash, a round is over and scored. Repeat twice and the game is done.

And yet Ohanami never feels rushed. The lightness of rules allows you to notice the smallest detail: to appreciate the gardens around you and compare them with your own – to feel the world stop for 20 minutes and appreciate the joy of play.

text-final

Ohanami creates a pleasing challenge out of mere pasteboard and ink, which replicates the experience of enjoying a well laid out garden. A subtle experience, but yet one available to anyone old enough to know their numbers and colors. 

Finding a game which plays quickly is easy. Finding one which plays quickly and deeply and with a structure which supports the theme of the game is much rarer.

Ohanami is a short, but evocative game.  It is accessible to almost anyone. The gift it gives us is time: leaving us  to look forward to many years beneath the cherry blossoms in quiet, playful contemplation. 

A game with such humble beauty and quiet pleasure needs no fanfare.  Exactly the reason we find it so worthy of both our awards. 

***

Written by: Doug Richardson

Similo

Similo Title Graphic - Major Fun Award

Release: 08/24/2020    Download:  Enhanced  | MP3
Run Time: 109 min    Subscribe:  Enhanced  | MP3 | RSS

Similo is a cooperative game of characters, communication, and deduction. Can you guide your team to the secret character in a grid of cards using only other character cards as clues? A vertical clue means the card is similar to the secret character. A horizontal clue means the card is different. Each round the pressure mounts, because the team has to remove more cards from the grid!

Similo comes in three flavors. You can play with people from history, myth, and storybook legend. If you’re up for a real challenge, you can even combine decks!

Similo is a springboard into the minds of everyone at the table. It provides a puzzle and laughs in equal measure. That’s a sure sign of Major Fun.

Listen in for our in-depth review!

Similo

Horrible Games  |  BGG

Designer: Hjalmar Hach, Pierluca Zizzi, Martino Chiacchiera

Publisher: Horrible Guild

Artist: Xavier (“Naiade”) Durin

2-8 players  10-15 min.  ages 8+   MSRP $10

Time to teach/learn: 3-4 minutes

For info on the other segments featured on the show, check out the show notes at The Spiel!

***

Music credits include:

History Repeating  by Kai Hoffman  |  the song

***

Gridopolis

Gridopolis

 Gridopolis |  BGG |  Buy

Designer: Dave Schultze
Publisher: Gridopolis Games 
2-4 players 20-60 minutes ages 8+
MSRP $50
Time to teach & learn: 5-6 minutes

text-the concept

Gridopolis is a game of construction and capture. Players build a multi-level modular board and then use pawns and kings to jump and capture their opponent’s pieces. Teleporters and blockers present challenges and opportunities in equal measure. And the game board itself will shape every decision you make, because each player has a chance to add new elements to it as the game unfolds! 

text-the components

Gridopolis has a wonderful set of basic building components that snap together to create multiple game boards. There are pads that make up the spaces the pawns and kings will move on. There are links that join pads together. The links have little nubbins that connect to posts, so game boards can be stacked together to form a three dimensional play space.

gridopolis components

Gridopolis is aptly named, because you’ll feel like you’ve created a small cityscape each time you play. 

There are suggested layouts for your first few games, but once you understand the basic concept, the sky’s the limit – each game board in Gridopolis can rise from the imagination of the players.

Gridopolis board set up and ready for play

Each player has six large colorful pawns to begin the game. The pawns can be flipped over to become Kings during the game. There are Kingerizer pieces in each player color; they nest into the pad spaces along the edge of the board to indicate a player’s home row.

There are also Hyper-pads and blocker tokens that will create different patterns of movement on the board when they are in play.

Once the Gridopolis board is built (including Hyper-pads), pawns are placed on opposite sides, separated by a neutral unoccupied area. Now you’re ready to play!

text-the mechanics

You’ll find many echoes of classic, almost universally known, games like Checkers and Chess in Gridopolis.

Your turn consists of selecting a pawn to move one pad (one space) in any direction, including diagonal movement AND including moves up or down! Every pawn has a home row marked by the Kingerizer pieces. A pawn’s move can never be backwards toward its home row.

people playing gridopolis - young and old

Jumping is not only allowed in Gridopolis, it’s the essence of the game. You can jump over your own pieces to extend a pawn’s movement. If you jump over an opponent’s piece, you capture it and remove it from the board. And just like it’s classic cousin, you can chain together multiple jumps to capture multiple pieces in a single move. You can even sacrifice your own piece by jumping off the board in order to make a capture! Your opponent gets the Kamikaze piece, so this move is one of desperation, usually.

If you can maneuver a pawn to the home row of an opponent, it flips over and becomes a King. Kings move just like pawns EXCEPT they get an optional bonus move after the first. This extra move gives you a ton of flexibility and adds new decisions and strategies to every turn.

If you land on a Hyper-pad, your piece beams immediately to another space with an empty hyper-pad on the board. The Gridopolis board may look big, but with even just a few hyper-pads, no space is safe… or very far away!

Envisioning and anticipating possible jumps across multiple levels makes Gridopolis a lovely dance between aggression and safety. Can you extend your pawn’s reach without risking a capture or exposing your home row, allowing other players to create kings?

excited kids playing the game

For a longer game, you can play until only one person has a piece remaining on the board. For a shorter game, you play a set number of turns and score based on how many pieces you collect and how many you have remaining on the board. High score wins. 

text-apart

Planning for the unknown sets Gridopolis apart. 

Instead of moving a pawn or king on your turn, each player has two additional options: 

you may place a blocker token on the board 

OR 

you may add a new space to the board. 

A blocker token is played to an unoccupied pad. That space is eliminated from play for the rest of the game. 

To add a new space to the board, you select pieces from a mini-construction kit each player starts with at the beginning of the game. You have three pads (with connector links) and two posts. You can add a space to any level. You can even add a level to the board with a post! 

gridopolis board built up

These options blow the game wide open.

The board is not a static thing in Gridopolis. You have to account for and anticipate not only where your opponent might move but what your opponent might do to change the very landscape of the game!

If the board was too sprawling, this could lead to brain-lock. By keeping the spaces of the game board limited, Gridoplolis encourages players to consider their options from different angles and perspectives in a very literal and fun way!

text-final

It’s a tricky thing to build a game on the back of such well known classics. There are so many poor examples floating through the world of games. They invite comparison with the greats and almost always are found wanting. 

What Gridopolis accomplishes is special and noteworthy. It strikes a lovely balance between familiar and new elements. It offers players a fun remix of the original. The classic is still recognizable in some form, but Gridopolis sings to new generations of players with a voice that is distinctive enough to rise up from the chorus of wannabes. 

Gridopolis combines the Lego-like joy of building with a meditative fun akin to a game of 3-D chess versus Mr Spock on the Enterprise. And, as Gridopolis is the first in a series of games using these same components, it’s encouraging to imagine many new paths to Major Fun building from this common ground.

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Written by: Stephen Conway

Shōbu

Shōbu

Smirk & Laughter Games|  BGG

Designer: Manolis Vranas, Jamie Sajdak
Publisher: Smirk & Laughter Games
2 players 20 minutes ages 8+
MSRP $ 30

text-the concept

Light and dark. Connection and separation. Peace and aggression. Shōbu is a game of balance… until it isn’t. Using a series of mirrored moves your goal is to push four of your opponent’s stones off a single game board.You started when you were young. Riding the trails, corralling horses through the wilderness, guiding them through shows and into camp to add to your herd.

text-the components

Shōbu is a beautiful game and most certainly evokes a sense of the classic game Go.

There are four lovely wooden boards: two dark and two light. Each board has a raised four by four grid. 

Each player has a set of sixteen stones: light or dark. These look like smooth river rocks. 

Boards are arranged in a square with dark on the left and light on the right. A small piece of cotton rope is placed between the boards to delineate the home area for each player (the two closest boards). 

Place stones on the bottom row of each board so they are facing each other and you’re ready to play Shōbu!

text-the mechanics

A turn in Shōbu has two parts: a passive move and an aggressive move. 

Your first move is passive and must be on one of your two home boards (the ones closest to you). Pick a stone and move it. This stone could move one or two spaces in any direction. 

BUT…

Because this move is passive, it cannot interact with any other pieces on the board. No pushing; no jumping. The passive move, in other words, must be unobstructed from start to finish.

The second move is aggressive and is inextricably tied to the first. Your aggressive move must be on the opposite color board (if your passive move was on the dark board, your aggressive move must be on a light board – including your opponent’s). Pick a stone and move it. 

BUT…

This move must mirror the direction and number of spaces of your passive move. And because this move is aggressive, your stone is allowed to push a single stone of your opponent. Two stones blocks pushing. And you can never push your own. 

That’s it. Start with a passive move each turn on one board. Mirror that move next with an aggressive move, hoping over time to push four opponent’s stones from a single board.

text-apart

Connection and backwards thinking set Shōbu apart. 

No piece in the game exists in isolation. Each of your stones is tethered to every other stone with an invisible thread. The better you can visualize this web of connections, the more clearly you will see opportunities and dangers on each board. 

Because of these connections, Shōbu asks you to think backward on every turn. In order to know the effect you want to create on the board, you start by planning your aggressive move, your last move, first. 

Look for a place where you might have the advantage. Find a place where you can push an opponent’s stone off the board. Once found, can you find its passive mirror move on the opposite color home board?

Moments of joy in Shōbu come from winding backward from your aggressive end goal to find a passive stone with clear path.

But be careful! Joy can turn to sorrow quickly if you don’t take the time to also think backward through your opponent’s next move.  A careless aggressive move might leave you open to being pushed around.

text-final

There are many flavors of fun. Some are obvious, wild, and boisterous. Others are more subtle but no less meaningful. Shōbu shows us play can be an act of serenity. Its simplicity opens a door to so many and gives players the space they need to explore the richness and depth hidden within the game. With its beautiful shifting stones connected by invisible tethers, Shōbu offers us a calm, thoughtful engaging form of fun. And that makes it worth of both our awards!

Written by: Stephen Conway

Special Note:

This review appears in the Winter 2019 issue of Casual Game Insider Magazine.

CGI publishes a wonderful selection of articles and reviews on a quarterly basis.  In 2019, a Major Fun review will be featured in each issue!

The Spiel, Major Fun and CGI share a common goal: opening doors to the wider world of play. We hope this cross promotion will invite more people into the game community.

Pioneers

Release: 4/1//2018    Download:  Enhanced  | MP3
Run Time: 82 min    Subscribe:  Enhanced  | MP3 | RSS

Westward ho! Immigrants from around the world have flocked to the United States to start a new life. As the country expands its territory to the Pacific, more and more pioneers set out, using stagecoaches and wagon trains, to reach new cities and towns along the way.

Each town has its own needs – a barkeep here, a farmer there, bankers, merchants, soldiers, innkeepers, and even a gold digger or two. Your job in Pioneers is to help these folks find a place that suits them by building roads and using your stagecoach. The player who does the best job settling this new generation of Americans will win the game

Pioneers is a gateway game to a new generation of players just discovering the hobby. It’s easy to learn, easy to teach and each time you play, you’ll discover new layers of depth and fun by charting a different path, literally.

Each pioneer you settle will give you a new way to see the game. And best of all how everyone else plays will change your decisions. Their choices will let you see the game in a new light every time.

Listen in for a full review and discover why Pioneers deserves BOTH the Major Fun and Spiel of Approval Awards!
Pioneers

Queen Games  |  BGG  |  Buy

Designer: Emanuelle Ornella Artist: Markus Erdt

Publisher: Queen Games

2-4 players  60 min   ages 8+   MSRP $50

For info on the Game Sommelier segment featured on the show, check out the show notes at The Spiel!

Music credits include:

Let Your Yeah Be Yeah  by The Pioneers  |  the song

Pioneers  by Tunng  |  the song

***

Codenames: Duet

Release: 11/21/2017    Download:  Enhanced  | MP3
Run Time: 60 min    Subscribe:  Enhanced  | MP3 | RSS

The party game Codenames took the game playing world by storm in 2015. Teams compete to find the secret names of their agents using a grid of word cards and two simple clues: a word and a number. It’s engaging, creative and loads of fun.

Duet offers us a tense two player transformation of the original. You and your partner must contact 15 agents using a grid of word cards and a very limited number of clues. The big problem is each of you only know half the agents in play!

More puzzle than party, Codenames Duet offers a totally different challenge and experience through the same basic set of rules. By all rights, Duet is a game that should not work. Reimagining a lively party game as a thoughtful deductive puzzle for two is a huge leap. And yet Duet sings in harmony with its older cousin – a familiar melody but clearly its own tune.

Listen in to discover why we celebrate this remarkable and resilient game design, in all its forms, as Major Fun!

Codenames: Duet

Czech Games Edition  |  BGG  |  Buy

Designer: Vlaada Chvatil, Scott Eaton

Publisher: Czech Games Edition

2 players  15-30 min   ages 12+   MSRP $19.95

Music credits include:

Hard Day’s Night   by Banda Plastica   |   the song

Tijuana Sound Machine  by Nortec Collective  |  the song

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The Great Dinosaur Rush

The Great Dinosaur Rush   APE Games  |  BGG  |  Buy

Designer: Scott Almes   Art: Mr. Cuddington   Publisher: APE Games
2-5 players  60 min. ages 10+  MSRP $50

text-the concept

There’s little doubt today’s world is dino-crazy. Few things fire our imagination like seeing the bones of these massive reptilian beasts that once ruled the Earth. And yet this was not always the case. Dinosaurs became part of popular culture due to the Great Dinosaur Rush over 120 years ago!

In the late 1800s, rival paleontologists scrambled to be the first to discover and promote new species of dinosaurs. They often stooped to devious and underhanded means to compete with and embarrass anyone who happened to get in the way. This Wild West approach to science left a black mark on American paleontology but this race for bones led to the discoveries of over 142 species of dinosaurs in a just a few year’s time! The flood of new bones to museums sparked public interest and the dino-craze that still rages on today!

In The Great Dinosaur Rush, each player is a famous fossil hunter from this era in history. Over three rounds you will search the American prairie for bones and use them to build the best dinosaurs and place them in museums. But beware, your opponents may try to sabotage your efforts along the way! You may need to play a little dirty to win, but if you gain too much notoriety, you could lose everything!

text-the components

The game comes with a bag of 210 wooden dinosaur bones. The bones come in five different colors, each color representing a different part of a dinosaur’s skeleton. Some will go on the board and the rest go in a drawstring bag.

There’s a game board representing the dig sites where you will discover the bones and several museum score tracks.

Each player has a screen (which you will use when building your dinos) plus a wooden paleontologist meeple and some scoring cubes.

There’s a bag of 45 notoriety tokens. The tokens are numbered 1-3. When you do underhanded things, you’ll have to draw from this bag.

There are 15 paleontologist cards, each one representing an actual fossil hunter of the era, complete with a small bio.

Last but not least are the 21 Dinosaur Bonus Cards. These cards show a specific layout of bones to create named dinosaurs. Some you may know and love and many you may not.

text-the mechanics

The game is played over the course of three turns. Each turn you has three parts: field, build and exhibit.

The field phase has the most parts and is the real meat of the game.

In the field phase, players collect bones, move their paleontologist on the board, adjust the museum score track and then take an action. Some of these actions are normal and some are notorious. If you take a notorious action, you will have to draw from the dreaded notoreity bag which can hurt your chances at winning.

Let’s look at each part in a little more detail.

You collect bones based on where your paleontologist is on the board. On the first turn, each space has three bones. Empty spaces will fill in with two on turn two and one on the last turn of the game, meaning you’ll collect the most bones early in the game and the least bones later on.

You move your paleontologist in a straight line as far as you want. You can pass other players but not tar pits. Remember, wherever you land, you’ll be picking up bones there to start your next turn.

On the board there are five museum scoring tracks. Each one corresponds to a different aspect of the dinosaur you’re going to build: size, height, length, ferocity, uniqueness. You choose one track and move its score cube up or down. This is your chance to improve or diminish the scoring potential for one particular aspect.

So after collecting, moving and adjusting the museum track you have one final choice to make: what action do you want to take?

There are three normal and three notorious actions from which to choose.

Normal actions go like this.

Publicize: You can move a score cube on one museum track up or down again.

Donate: You can get rid of three bones to score points or get rid of a notoriety token.

Research: You can draw an extra dinosaur bonus card.

Notorious actions go like this.

Sabotage: You can draw and place a notoriety token on the board. Anyone who moves through this space will have to pick it up.

Dynamite: You get rid of the three bones on the space where you stand and then draw three new bones from the bag and keep them.

Steal: You can steal a bone from a space adjacent to the one where you stand, including a space with an opponent.

Notorious actions come with a catch, though. You must draw a notoriety token from the bag. The tokens are numbered 1-3. Keep your tokens secret. They will either help you or really hurt you when it comes time to score at the end of the game. Playing a little dirty is ok, as long as the other players are dirtier than you!

It might seem like a lot to take in the first turn but each part flows nicely to the next. There’s a nice aid with the actions on your player screen so you can see all your options at a glance.

Even better, there’s a family version of the game included that ignores notoreity altogether, so you can ease yourself into the game if the many actions seem too much at first.

Players will repeat the field phase three times each turn and then move on to Build and Exhibit, which brings us to….

text-apart

All the decisions you take in the field phase, to acquire bones, to move and position the museum track – all the actions you take are driven by one goal: build the best dinosaur you can!

Now this isnt some theoretical task. You actually get to take the bones you collect and physically build a dinosaur behind your screen!!

Remember the colored bones correspond to particular parts, so each dino must have a head, a neck, a spine, ribs, two limbs and might even have some unique features. There’s a helpful chart on each player screen outlining the various requirements for building your dino.

The important thing to remember is that within these general guidelines, the sky’s the limit. You can arrange the bones to make your own personal dinosaur any way you can imagine.

Dinosaurs like these!

Behold the Dogosaurus. Notice the spiked tail and horns. A reptilian cousin to man’s best friend?

Next up is the Squareadactyl. Graceful wings lifted this gentle square headed beast into the clouds.

The mighty Triangasaurus Rex hopped like a kangaroo on its massive hind legs and attacked with the massive triangular cudgel on its tail.

And last but not least is the Overbitetrodon. Its massive head and bottome jawis held up by an ultra-strong neck. It feeds itself using arms on its head and twin tails.

And if you’ve done a great job collecting the right bones, you may even be able to build one of the dinos depicted on your bonus cards. These will score extra points.

I cannot adequately express how fun it is to be in charge of creating your own dinosaur each turn. You must use all the bones you collect so you may have to get creative with extra long tails or a giant head or a really really long set of arms. It’s a bit like a puzzle but it’s a puzzle that you can form and reform until you find the shape that pleases you best and (you hope!) will score you the most points. Best yet, you keep the bones you dug up on previous turns, so as the game moves forward, you’ll build bigger and bigger dinosaurs.

And honestly, regardless of your ultimate scoring potential, so much of the joy of the game comes from putting your dino together in a way that will cause the others to laugh and marvel when they see your creation!

When everyone is ready, you reveal your dinos and move on to the Exhibit, the last phase of each turn. Look back to the museum tracks and score based on the position of the cubes on each track.

Who has the largest dino? (the most ribs)

Who has the tallest dino? (neck plus the longest limb)

Who has the longest dino? (tail plus spine)

Who has the most ferocious dino? (head plus shortest limb)

Who has the most rare dino (most unique bones).

First second and third places score, so even if you’re not the longest or tallest, you can still rack up points. If you’re able to build any of your special dino cards, show them and score those points too.

So there’s planning during the field phase, the joy and strategy of making dinos in the build phase, and then the payoff with scoring points in the exhibit phase. Each turn ends with its own payoff which makes each turn almost feel like a game in and of itself.

At game’s end the high score wins the game BUT…

Remember those Notoriety tokens? The player with the most notoriety has to SUBTRACT his or her total notoriety taken throughout the game from his or her final score. Other players get to ADD their notoriety to their scores! This means if you play too nicely, you may miss out on a bunch of points and if you play too dirty, you run the risk of a huge negative at the end of the game. The trick is to be a little mean but not so mean you cost yourself the game. It’s a terriffic challenge – very cleverly implemented but easy to understand.

text-final

The Great Dinosaur Rush is certainly at the higher end of the complexity scale when it comes to Major Fun but it is a worth recipient of both honors due to the inclusion of the family rules and the outrageous amount of fun and freedom players have in creating new dinosaurs every turn.

As a Spiel of Approval winner, the game provides great payoff for strategic thinking and the notoriety mechanics give each decision several layers to think through. There’s also a great deal of effort to bring the actual history of the period into the game. Each paleontologist not only has a short biography but they each have a special power that is in synch with the person’s story as well.

For instance, you can play as Mary Anning a noted fossil hunter who discovered one of the first and most complete pterodactyls. She was the inspiration for the tongue twister “She sells seashells down by the seashore. ” Since she was such a prolific fossil hunter, her ability allows her to draw three bones from the bag and place them in her space on the board if that space is empty.

Or you could play as Barnum “Mr. Bones” Brown. He was the cheif fossil hunter for the American Museum of Natural History. His preferred method of searching for fossils was dynamiting fields and picking through the rubble. Naturally, his ability involves dynamite. If you take the dynamtie action, you get to draw an extra bone from the bag.

I love games that can be appreciated by many different players on many different levels. The Great Dinosaur Rush is a wonderful example of a game that strikes a fantastic and fun balance between strategy and accessibility.

Plus, did I mention you get to build dinosaurs every turn?

Easy to see why this game has won our hearts. Give it a go and I think there’s a good chance it might stomp and roar its way into your heart, too.

***

Double Play

Double Play   INversion Games  |  BGG  |  Amazon

Designer: Alvin Sanico   Graphic Design: Alvin Sanico, Michael Graham, Scott Kim  Publisher: INversion Games  1-6 players  10-20 min. ages 10+  MSRP $9.99

text-the concept

Double Play is a set of word games a fun twist, literally. Every letter card in the deck is actually two different letters, depending on the direction you play the card!

text-the components

Double Play is a deck of Versatileletter cards. What the heck is a Versatileletter, you ask ? It’s a specially designed font that represents two different letters, depending on the orientation of the card.

That means an upside down t can be an f.   A d can be a p.

  

An h can be a y. Or an s can be a v.

 

Like Scrabble, each letter is assigned a value. But because each card is two letters, the value of the card also changes based on how you play it.

Every card back contains the entire alphabet, so if when you’re learning to decipher the letters, you always have a guide handy

text-the mechanics

There are four games included in Double Play:

Finders Stealers: A race to find the longest word from face up letters on the table (2 per player).

Solitaire Dare: Just like it sounds, lay out letter cards in columns and try to form words to play every card in each column.

The Final Word: A 2 player game where players take turns playing cards from a common hand, but only the last word played each round will score.

These first three games can be interesting and fun but the fourth game, Word Wars 1-2-3, is the reason Double Play is Major Fun.

There are 3 rounds in Word Wars 1-2-3. Each round you get a hand of 10 cards.

Your job is to form 3 words using all 10 cards. You’re looking for the three highest scoring words you can find.

Pro tip: you may want some scratch paper handy for each player to write out various words you find and the score for each word! I’d also recommend setting a timer (5 minutes to start; once you’re comfortable, reduce the time to 3 minutes a round).

Once each player has found his or her three words, you’ll compare your results.

I dealt myself a hand of 10, set the timer for 3 minutes.

Here’s your hand. See if you can beat me!

Here’s what I came up with. la (3) cuff (12) yuck (15)

First, compare Word 1, your lowest scoring word. The player with the higher value, scores 1 point.

Next, compare Word 2, the middle scoring word. The player with the higher value scores 2 points.

Finally, compare Word 3, your highest scoring word. The player with the higher value scores 3 pts.

If you make a clean sweep in a round you get a bonus of 4 extra points.

After 3 rounds of play, the player with the highest score wins!

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The innovative graphic design in Double Play is the heart and soul of the game. Without this fun twist, it would be like a thousand other word games under the sun. But this letter system will turn some of your assumptions about word games on their heads.

Unlike a traditional word game, Double Play avoids the bad mix of letters problem that has plagued many a Scrabble player through the decades. You don’t have to raise your fist and curse the spelling gods for giving you a hand that spells A-E-I-I-O-O-U because in Double Play that hand would also be

E-A-L-L-C-C-N. The dreaded Q-W-G-C-H-L-T is also P-M-K-O-Y-I-F. Or ANY combination of the two sets of letters! You may not find a 10 letter word in every hand or every round you play, but there is an amazing variety available in every hand. It’s up to you to find it!

Word Wars 1-2-3 takes full advantage of this variety and gives each player a fun word puzzle to solve each round. Especially if you add in a little time pressure, once you are familiar with the letter system, you’ll see how the deck and the rules connect to give you the sense that there’s always a better word just waiting to be discovered.

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The designer of Double Play offers up a creative set of cards and a clever set of games but perhaps best of all, the designer encourages players to use the cards to find other ways to play. The wacky letter cards certainly entice you to try classic word games (try a crossword style game, building the board with cards) or even tweak the games they provide.

After a few games of Word Wars 1-2-3, we found it was even more fun to make each of our 3 words using the entire hand of 10 cards for all three words. This encourages finding longer and higher scoring words and can result in even more fun discoveries hidden in your hand.

Using the same hand above and three minutes, here are the 3 words I found with the Major Fun variant.

Knot (10) yuck (15) toughen (15)

See how you do using the same hand, using all 10 letters to form three words.

Double Play encourages players to be playful with the game itself. You can use the cards to find new ways to have fun. That’s a concept that’s woven into the fabric of Major Fun.

For its value, versatility and fun, any lover of word games will find lots of reasons to love Double Play.

And if traditional word games have left you frustrated, Double Play’s new twist gives you plenty of reasons to give it a try.

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Tak: A Beautiful Game

Release Date: 3/13/2017 Download:  Enhanced  | MP3
Running Time:  51 min Subscribe:  Enhanced  | MP3 | RSS

“No one wins a dance. Why would I want to win anything other than a beautiful game?”

– Bredon  The Wise Man’s Fear  by Patrick Rothfuss

Tak comes to us from two beautiful and beautifully different minds.

First from writer Patrick Rothfuss. In his epic fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicles, Kvothe, the protagonist, learns the game of Tak from a courtier named Bredon. The game becomes the basis for their friendship and the foundation for understanding Bredon’s worldview.

Second from game designer James Ernest. Inspired by the novels, James brought Tak from the page to reality. But creating a game that is supposed to be on par with the likes of Chess or Go is no small task!

And yet Tak is just that. A game that feels universal, simple, elegant and accessible. A game that you can play anywhere and with anyone. A game that is beautiful because HOW you play matters as much as winning or losing.

And a game that is worthy both the Major Fun and Spiel of Approval Award!

Listen in to explore Tak – it’s backstory, the game itself, and why we think it deserves an honored place on your table, too.

Tak: A Beautiful Game

Cheapass Games  |  BGG  |  Worldbuilders

Designer: James Ernest & Patrick Rothfuss

Publisher: Cheapass Games

2 players  15-20 min.  ages 8+  MSRP $9,$55,$90

Music credits include:

Tinker, Tanner   by bluedanbob   |  the song

The Name of the Wind   by Ken Bonfield  |  the song 

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Chronicler

Release Date: 9/6/2016 Download:  Enhanced  | MP3
Running Time:   43 min Subscribe:  Enhanced  | MP3 | RSS

Chronicler is a small game with large aspirations.  With less than 100 cards, Chronicler explores the march of technology through time. You’ll be telling the story of your civilization through the tools you choose to build… in 20 minutes or less

Now, this isn’t a civilization building game in the long line of a complicated titles that gamers know and love. This is a civ builder kids and families can learn and enjoy. You’re not going to find historical depth in this level of game but it doesnt pretend to offer it. Instead you hit fast forward on the time machine. Plant the seed for your culture with a single card and see how your tech tree grows.

Tune in to learn what we love about Chronicler and why it deserves the Major Fun Award.

Chronicler

Deinko  |  BGG  |  Funagain

Designer: GB Kim  Publisher: Deinko

2-4 players  20 min.  ages 10+  MSRP $25

Music credits include:

Bidin’ My Time   by Sarah Vaughn   |  the song

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