Game Preview: Snow Tails

By W. Eric Martin
September 1, 2008

Publisher: Fragor Games
Designers: Fraser & Gordon Lamont
Players: 2-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Release Date: Spiel 08
Languages: English & German
Price: €35
Link:

One of my favorite games is Wolfgang Reidesser’s Ave Caesar. This chariot-racing game features simple, easily teachable rules, lively play, probability management, multiple tracks for varied play, and a high potential for screwage as players jockey for position on the racetrack. If five or six of us are gathered around a table wondering what to play, I’ll undoubtedly push this game as an option.

Which brings us to Snow Tails, the forthcoming release from Fragor Games. Snow Tails puts players in charge of a husky sled dog team and sends them racing across the snow and ice to see who can finish the race first.

Mush Ado About Moving

Like Ave Caesar, Snow Tails gives each player his own deck of movement cards, but rather than having a single card determine your movement, designers Gordon and Fraser Lamont have created a more realistic – although still straight-forward – movement system. Your sled comes preprinted with a left and right dog, each of strength 3, and a brake set on 3 out of a range of 1-5; your speed is equal to the sum of the two dogs minus the brake, so as initially set up the sled has a speed of 3. Naturally your sled doesn’t stay that way for long or else the game wouldn’t be much of a challenge!

Each turn, you start by playing 1-3 cards from your hand of five; your deck includes four cards each of numbers 1-5, and all of the cards you play must have the same number. For each card, you decide whether to play it on a dog – replacing a previously played card or covering the preprinted number – or discard it to reset the brake to the number on the card. You can play only one card to each position.

Once you do this, you move your sled based on its new speed (dogs minus brake), but if one dog is stronger than the other one, then your sled also drifts across the ice during your movement due to the lopsided team. Drift too far, and you’ll hit the sidewall, er, packed snow, which damages your sled. To represent this, you add a dent card to your hand, which means that when you refill your hand to five at the end of your turn, you’ll have fewer movement options for the rest of the game. Collect five dent cards, and your sled goes to pieces, leaving you stranded in the wilderness with soon-to-be-ravenous sled dogs. Paging Jack London…

You can also collect dent cards by exceeding the safety speed when entering the corners, with one dent for each point by which you exceed the limit. Running into other players thankfully only hampers your hand for a single turn, with you not being able to refill to five cards until the end of your next turn. That said, expect further bad things to happen when you have less control over future movement.

If you have a balanced dog team, with the same number in each slot, and it’s not the first turn, then you have an optional bonus movement equal to your position in the race. While potentially lethal in the corners, the burst of power can work Hare & Tortoise-like wonders for those at the rear of the pack.

Make Tracks

As with many other race games, Snow Trails includes modular track components that can be used to create hundreds of different configurations. The rulebook includes more than a half-dozen suggestions, many of which make use of some of the more challenging track components. On the reverse of some of the straight pieces are straightaways with young saplings (that damage the first sled that hits each tender tree), a snow drift (that makes the track more difficult to navigate), and a chasm that bottlenecks sledders through a single sled width of snow.

The Lamonts have foregone their typically elaborate and colorful components – the rats of Hameln, the sheep of Shear Panic and the deer of Antler Island – for basic wood sled tokens, which isn’t surprising given the headache those deer caused in 2007. (The figure supplier insisted that the Lamonts take 10,000 deer instead of the previously agreed-upon figure of 4,000, which led to an extra-large print run of 2,500 and numerous headaches at Spiel 07 trying to cope with more boxes than could properly fit the booth.) That said, the design of the sleds is a nice touch as each one includes a swivel mount that allows a player to rotate the sled in order to align the sled mat with the sled’s current orientation on the track. No more neck strain trying to determine left from right while headed toward a wall!

As with previous Fragor releases, Snow Tails is available in a limited edition (1,000 copies this time) and the Lamonts are taking reservations for pick-up at Spiel 08 on their website.

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