Dale Yu: Some New Games with the Kids

So… A big box from Germany just landed on my porch this week, and wouldn’t you know it—it was chock full of games!  While I haven’t had time to get a good look at everything inside, the kids made sure that we tried out the ones meant for their age group!

Kiki Ricky
Designer: Gunter Baars
Publisher: Ravensburger
Time: 20+ minutes
Age: 4+
Can adults play it?  A few times (maybe…)

First up was Kiki Ricky.  This is a nice little kids strategy game from Ravensburger.  The board is a molded plastic step pyramid.  At the top of this pyramid is a perch with a chicken on it.  Attached to the perch is a chute (which can be aimed at all parts of the board) that players can roll eggs down the pyramid from.

Is that it?  Not quite.  As you move your hens up, there are a few obstacles that you can hide behind.  When you move a hen up, you can place it on any space on the next higher level, so there is definitely an advantage to being able to move up first as you’ll have your choice of the better spaces.  There are also some better hiding places than others in the rest of the spots, and the kids had a good time trying to figure out which spots afforded more protection.  The kids also learn a bit about positional play.  It’s definitely better to try to put your own hens directly underneath the opponents because it protects them to a degree.

That’s all there is to this little game.  It takes about 20 minutes to play and was easily grasped by my four-year-old.  The one caveat about the game is that there could be a bit of stagnation at the end of the game—once you get to the penultimate step, there aren’t a lot of places to hide.  As a result, those hens are quite often knocked back down the pyramid before the player gets another chance to roll the dice!  But it’s silly fun.  My kids definitely enjoy this, and this is a game that they will blissfully be able to play by themselves as well as with the parents!

Will adults want to play this?  Not too often, IMHO.  There’s frankly not much of a game here.  Most of the enjoyment I got from this was just from watching the kids laugh as the hens were knocked down (repeatedly) by the egg.  There is a little bit of strategy in the game, but in the end, it’s just a dicefest.  There are a few good concepts that the kids can take from this game, but there’s not much here for adults.

Burg Appenzell
Designer: Bernhard Weber, Jens-Peter Schliemann
Publisher: Zoch
Time: 30-45 minutes
Age: 6+
Can adults play it?  Yes!

The next game that the kids found was one of the new Zoch releases, Burg Appenzell.  When I placed my order, I didn’t really know much about it (nor did I know that Rio Grande was considering publishing it as well!), but I’ve liked just about all of the Zoch games targeted at kids, so I bought it on spec and just hoped it wasn’t another Schleck und Weg!

The game itself is a combination of a maze game and a memory game.  Each player in the game has a set of four mice.  You move these mice through the castle and try to find cheese.  Anytime that you have two of your mice standing on the same type of cheese, you get a marker representing that type of cheese (out of the seven varieties in the game).  The first player to get four different cheese markers wins the game.

Before you start playing, you have to assemble the board.  The box insert has a inset grid where you place a number of square tiles.  Some of these tiles have pictures of cheese on them.  Some of the tiles just have empty stone flooring on them, and three of them have holes in them—these are the mousetraps!  Once you have the grid filled with these tiles, there will be one left over.  It will be used later in the game.

On top of these tiles, you then place a cardboard layer with square holes in it.  This layer is actually one of the sprues that had some of the unpunched tiles in it.  This layer allows you to see about 50% of the tiles underneath.  On this layer, there is a printed pattern of “rooms” that can be 1x2 tiles in size, 1x3 or 2x2.  Conveinently enough, you have a whole bunch of roof tiles that are then laid over the board in the same pattern as what is printed.

Once you have done all three layers, you’re ready to play the game!  On your turn, you have a number of options.  You get four action points to use on your turn.  First, you can move a sheep.  Your first sheep starts in the corner of board, and you can spend a point to move it one tile orthogonally.  Of course, you can only do this if you can see the floor of the room—and to do that, the roof of that room has to be removed!  Which brings us to the second possible action… For an action point, you can remove the roof to any room which any of your sheep is adjacent to (including diagonally).  There is no limit (other than the overall limit of four actions) to moving sheep or removing roofs.  The final action can only be done once a turn—that is to move the tiles underneath the floor of the castle.  To do this, you take the unused floor tile and place it at the end of any row or column of tiles.  You then push it into the castle until the tile on the opposite side falls out of the castle (to be used the next time the tiles are moved).  As I mentioned earlier, three of the tiles have holes in them – if one of these traps is slid underneath a mouse, that mouse falls into the basement and is out of the game.

Each time that you move a sheep or move the tiles, you need to check whether any player has managed to get two of his sheep on the same type of cheese.  If that happens, that player gets a token for that type of cheese.  Finally, at the end of the turn, the board is surveyed.  Any exposed room which does not have a mouse in it at the end of the turn is covered back up.  This is where the memory comes into the game—as you have to remember what tiles are where… and also remember where they might have moved to as a result of all the tile shifting!  Again, the game goes on until one player has four types of cheese OR until one player has only one mouse left, and at that point, the player with the most cheese tokens wins.

The game itself presents a fair number of choices each turn, though you can be limited if all of your mice are in the same portion of the board.  The memory aspect can be a bit more challenging that it seems mainly because you’re always dealing with imperfect information.  Since you can see only a fraction of the floor tiles (due to the irregular pattern of holes in the second layer), it seemed like there were always one or two tiles that would surprise me when it showed up each round.

As far as a kids game goes, it’s fairly complex.  After two games, I’m not sure whether my kids have figured out the way that moving the tiles affects the locations of the cheese.  There is a fair amount of advance planning needed to be able to predict or manipulate the locations of the tiles to be where you want them on your turn.

The limitation on action points has helped them think through a turn to be able to do all the things that they want to do.  As we first started the game, both of the boys would remove all the roofs that they could reach as they wanted to see what kinds of cheese were available to them.  However, they would usually run out of points and not be able to move their mice onto those squares as a result.  With some experience, they now have learned to remove fewer roofs in an attempt to control more cheese.

There is an inherent meanness to the game which could easily come to the forefront with older kids or all adult players.  There are three traps in the game, and it could be quite conceivable that the traps could be moved to make many mice disappear during the course of the game.  Of course, this would usually take two or even three consecutive moves to make it happen, but it’s a distinct possibility.  We didn’t have to worry too much about this with the kids as they were really unable to follow through with this long-term planning/strategy, but it would certainly add a new dimension to the decision of where to leave your mice at the end of any given turn.

The one other thing that I would need more plays to see is whether or not there is a kingmaker ending to this game.  Given the way that the board can change on each player’s turn, and the fact that people can gain a cheese token on anyone’s turn, I could easily see a situation where each player ends up only making sure that the next player can’t win on his turn… But I’ll have to play it with all adults first to see!

Well, it’s time to get back to those new games and tear through the shrinkwrap and all that.  Anyone have any extra small plastic baggies?

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

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