Game Preview: Surf’s Up, Dude!

By W. Eric Martin
January 16, 2008

Publisher: Jolly Roger Games
Designers: Alan R. Moon & Aaron Weisblum
Players: 2-6
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Release Date: January 2008

Starting in 2001, Alan R. Moon and Aaron Weissblum have been the gaming community’s Lennon and McCartney, its Simon and Garfunkel. The pair has designed many well-received games—the 10 Days series, Capitol, San Marco, New England, Oasis, King’s Breakfast, Mammoth Hunters. Okay, maybe not Mammoth Hunters, but if you saw those two names on the box, you were usually keen to give the game a fair shot.

Every partnership must come to an end, and Surf’s Up, Dude! is the final ride for this team, although Moon has in fact said that the game was designed a few years ago, not recently.

In Surf’s Up, Dude!, each player controls six surfers—surfing meeples, mind you—who are participating in a surfing competition. The gameboard has a beach on one side, and along the adjacent edge are areas for the surfers to paddle out to deep water and to wait to catch waves. The waves are on the other side of the board, and each turn new waves appear, bumping existing waves towards the beach.

“There are three different types of waves: Monsters, Pipelines, and Babies,” says Moon. “Players play cards to have their surfers catch waves, with a number of surfers allowed on each wave. The first surfer on a wave gains the Prime Position—but as the waves roll in, the order of the surfers on a wave can change as they compete to show off for the judges. Occasionally, there will also be a shark sighting, and surfers must then decide whether to stay on the wave or paddle to safety. Competitions and sharks both involve more card play by the players involved. When a wave reaches the beach, all the surfers on it score points according to their positions on the wave.”

“At the end of each turn,” Moon continues, “players each get three actions. A player can use each action to draw a new card or to move a surfer on the beach to the paddling out area or to move a surfer who is paddling out to the ready area. The waves continue to roll in until the horn blasts to signal that the end of the competition is near. The last few waves are then scored, and the player whose surfers have scored the most points is the winner.”

Note that the artwork shown is from preliminary designs, although the finished artwork will look similar.

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"Alan & Aaron” was indeed one of the great designer partnerships in modern gaming history.  By my reckoning, they created 18 games together, and that doesn’t even include all the separate “10 Days...” designs.  Between them, those titles picked up 3 SdJ nominations (including one finalist) and one recommendation; 4 DSP top ten finishers; 4 IGA nominations (including one winner, San Marco); 2 a la carte top five finishers; 2 Spiele der Spiele recommendations; and a Games Magazine Game of the Year (New England).  A total of 9 games received at least one of these honors.  Most of them were released during their lush period from 2001-2003.  The teaming is surely missed, but not forgotten.  Hopefully, Surf’s Up will prove to be a worthy swan song for this great team. Posted by Larry Levy on Jan 17, 2008 at 11:07 AM | #

I did a quick status check on this out of curiousity. Jacob Walker got coaxed out of retirement to do the art. I’ve always been partial to his stuff...(He had been taking a break from doing art because his wife spawned a new Walker. Apparently, the truck with the games just showed up a couple of minutes ago, so copies should be starting into distribution shortly. Posted by Frank Branham on Jan 17, 2008 at 01:20 PM | #

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