Game Review: Go Nuts!

By W. Eric Martin
July 16, 2008

Publisher: Gamewright
Designers: Brian S. Spence, Garrett J. Donner and Michael S. Steer
Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 12 minutes
Rules Language: English & Spanish
Price: $6.50
Links:

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Five, four times with 2 and once with 3

Go Nuts! gives us all an opportunity to reflect upon punctuation, specifically the use of commas in imperative statements. To illustrate, consider the difference in meaning between “Kick, John!” and “Kick John!” With the first command, you’re telling John that he better kick something, be it a clump of dirt, a football or a mugger reaching for his wallet; with the second command, you’re telling someone to plant a boot in John himself. John would appreciate you not confusing those two phrases.

With Go Nuts!, Gamewright is not encouraging us to spur on the spontaneous manifestation of nuts – something that the name should suggest since you’re trying to collect as many acorns as possible – but rather to go berserk, possibly using the packaged dice and pencil to wreak mayhem on opponents.

Let’s assume, however, that Gamewright is merely trying to be clever by trading on a familiar expression to title a game that evokes the feeling of gathering, as with a squirrel that gathers food for the winter, and not encouraging us toward chaos, riots and free love in the park. I’m feeling charitable, okay?

Now, back to that nut-gathering squirrel – you are that squirrel, and you want to stash fifty nuts (or whatever other total you and the other squirrels agree on) before anyone else. You are driven, you are obsessed, you are a Type-A squirrel. To collect those precious acorns, you’ll roll dice each round. You start with five dice, but each time you roll a car, you must set that die aside. Cars = death for squirrels, after all, so no touchy. Each acorn you roll is worth a point; each squirrel you roll is a chum getting in your face saying, “Got any nuts yet? Got any nuts yet? Got any nuts yet?” He is worthless to you, both as a fellow nut-gatherer and a friend.

Each time you roll, you set aside the cars, count the acorns, then decide whether to keep searching by rolling again with non-car dice or to stop with your meager holdings.

If the dice show all cars on any roll, you panic and lose all the acorns you rolled for that turn; if the dice show all squirrels on any roll, you flip out, lose all your current holdings, and try to inflict punishment on those so-called friends by rolling them over and over, scoring one for each acorn you lift from them. All of the other players try to stop you by siccing a dog on you. The details of how that works aren’t clear, but they each have a die that shows a dog house on five faces and a dog on the sixth. They roll like maniacs until one of them gets a dog, which puts an end to your acorn-grabbing frenzy.

While all of the above might sound exciting with animals dashing to and fro, you don’t actually get to pound anyone and take their nuts; you’re rolling dice la la la and every so often all the players roll dice extremely quickly. With adults, we looked at each other as if to say “Are we really sitting here tossing these tiny cubes around again and again for no reason?” – but my six-year-old test player loved it. At first, he didn’t grasp the push-your-luck concept of the game (and I didn’t tell him ahead of time so as to see when the light might go on), but in the second game he suddenly said, “Oh, you’re taking a chance each time you roll.” Bingo, young sir. From that point on, he did better, stopping when the odds seemed poor.

Go Nuts! does include a small catch-up feature in that rolling an acorn on a single die allows you to unlock all the dice and start rolling again, but the odds of doing so are slim. Ideally you won’t get that far in the hole that you need to chase nutty rainbows.

Aside from not appealing to the older crowd (or at least the older crowd in my neck of the woods), Go Nuts! has one other problem in that after a short period of time it resembles:

Yes, as with other “12 Minute Games” from Gamewright, Go Nuts! is in a flimsy tuckbox that is ideal for display on a pegboard hanger but lousy for containing the game after any amount of handling. After putting the game in my shoulder bag, it came out looking like a flat, nut-filled pancake with the dice serving as the bumps. One flap tore off the box, the pencil keeps falling out, and any parent worth their salt will recognize that their children will start losing components immediately, making future tuckbox games less attractive purchases.

Publishers like tuckboxes because they’re cheap and have a built-in display feature (a hole for the pegboard hook), but tuckboxes should be replaced by hard boxes with lids, as with the small card games from Amigo. You can attach a small plastic hook or holder to the package’s shrinkwrap during manufacturing, therefore satisfying the display requirement and eliminating the parental “why-did-I-waste-six-bucks-on-this” concern. Sure, the production cost would rise, but don’t game players deserve a secure location to store their nuts?

Want to manifest some acorns of your own? Then head to BGN’s Games for the Animals page to see whether this game is still available!

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Comments:

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Very droll, Eric.  Funny, I was just thinking the same thing with respect to the tuckbox for Gamewright’s Duck Duck Bruce this morning after a few hands with my seven-year-old playtester. Some of their games seem to come in both the tuckboxes and sturdy boxes, such as at least Sleeping Queens.  Any idea whether this is the case for all of their games that come in tuckboxes? Posted by Jeffrey D Myers on Jul 16, 2008 at 10:25 AM | #

Jeffrey, I passed your question along to Jason Schneider at Gamewright, and here’s his response: “All games in our 12 Minute Games line, (which Go Nuts! is a part of) come only in tuck boxes. Some our more popular signature card games (Rat-a-Tat Cat, Slamwich, Sleeping Queens for example) are available in both tuck box and set up box configurations.” Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Jul 16, 2008 at 11:02 AM | #

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