Designers: Oussama Khelifati
Publisher: Captain Games
Artist: Adrien Journel
2-7 players | 20 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $18 | BGG Entry
Time to teach & learn: 4-5 minutes
Game Synopsis
It’s bath time and all your rubber ducks have decided to join the fun. It’s nice having the whole flock together until you realize one big problem. With all this splashing around, you won’t have any water left in the tub!
One by one, players try to consolidate their duck cards from a grid into stacks. Everyone plays at the same time. Like Bingo, the Captain draws a card and calls out a number. Everyone must find this number duck in their grid and use it to cover a neighor OR fly it to a new part of the tub. If your duck has already been covered, you QUACK to let folks know you didnt get to move. If everyone QUACKS, we are all one step closer to the end of the round. The bathtub with the lowest number of splashes after three rounds wins the game.
Why We Love Duck & Cover
There’s a puzzly challenge in each bathtub grid of cards you face in Duck & Cover. Every time the Captain calls a number you have the opportunity to improve your situation. You want to manipulate your ducks into fewer and fewer stacks before the end of the round. Points are bad in Duck & Cover, so each duck you can see at the top of a stack will add to your score UNLESS… you manage to pull all your ducks into a single stack. In this case, the value of this final duck is subtracted from your score!
There’s no middle ground here. High numbers could make your score skyrocket or plummet. From the very first card the Captain calls out, there’s a deliciously tense decision to make. Do you press your luck and keep high numbers face up in your tub OR do you play it safe and cover them the first chance you get?
This tension is created by the chaos of the shuffle. No one knows what the Captain will draw next. There are two of each numbered duck plus two special cards. If a round continues deep into the draw deck, players can make more informed decisions based on which numbers remain. Informal alliances or cheering sections will form each round because of the shuffle. Some players will be begging for a 7 while others booo 7s and chant to the soapy gods for a 5.
Every bath builds to a fun crescendo in Duck & Cover. It’s a game of fluid tactics guided by a sometimes fickle and sometimes forgiving deck of cards. This means victory for you on a given round could look very different from others. Maybe the best you could do was limit your losses, given the flow of the cards. There’s an ebb and flow to Duck & Cover that makes for engaging highs and hilarious lows. It plays so quickly that, even when our toes were wrinkled up like raisins from another round of baths, Duck & Cover kept us coming back for more.
Congratulations to designer Oussama Khelifati
More information on Duck & Cover at Captain Games
