Game Review: Ice Flow

By W. Eric Martin
June 4, 2008

Publisher: Ludorum Games
Designers: Dean Conrad & John Streets
Players: 2-4
Ages: 11+
Playing Time: 60 minutes
Rules: English/German/French

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Four, twice each with 2 & 4 players

In 2007, Dean Conrad won the Best Boardgame Award at the UK Games Expo for Fagin’s Gang (BGN review); in 2008, he won the award once again – this time sharing co-design credit with John Streets – for Ice Flow. As part of the expert judging panel, I think the game is a great choice as it works well for both family gamers and the more hardcore crowd.

In practice, Ice Flow lives up to my early description of the game as a mash-up of the Frogger video game and Wolfgang Kramer’s Goldland. The ice floes shift back and forth through the Bering Strait, following the paths and speeds laid out on the gameboard. While trying to move from Alaskan research stations to the Siberian shore, your explorers can jump from one floe to another for free if the edges are solid or by spending a rope if one has pack ice. To swim between floes, you eat a fish for energy – or perhaps coat yourself with its oil to keep out the cold. The details are unclear.

Your backpack – which is mysteriously shared by your three explorers, no matter where they happen to be in their travels – holds only three items, which means you’re constantly shifting items in and out, weighing your immediate travel needs with longer-term goals of siccing a polar bear on someone else (by throwing the bear a fish) and preparing to swim to Siberia. The board is seeded with rope, fish and polar bears beforehand, and more items enter the game only when someone introduces a new ice floe. The goods are randomly determined, however, so waiting to introduce a floe until you need to enter a space could throw an unexpected bear in your face.

The polar bears serve as both impediment and potential weapon depending on the nature of those playing. In a four-player game with casual gamers, the other players treated the bear as an obstacle, something to be avoided or moved out of the way as you traversed the board. When I aimed a bear at a helpless explorer, who had no fish to redirect the bear and no escape routes, the other player seemed surprised that I would be so mean. Hey, it was me or you, baby.

In my other games, with more experienced gamers, you could tell that players were stockpiling fish in order to threaten a bear attack or hold one off. There was more forethought and planning in general, with players introducing new floes well in advance of their explorers nearing Siberia, for example, and more organized movement across the board. Since the only random element is the discovery of new items on floes, you can ponder and plan quite a bit if you wish – although this will benefit you the most only in two-player games.

One element of possible concern is that in the three games with gamers, the losers were only a turn behind the winners; in fact, all three players in the four-player game could have won on their next turn! (This wasn’t the case with the family gamers as I won several turns before anyone else could.)

Games where everyone advances equally toward the goal no matter which actions a player makes will have a short lifespan among gamers because they want skill to make a difference in who wins and who loses. What was happening in our games, I think, is that we were all focused on moving forward, which set up chains of floes that allowed players in the backfield to advance quickly because others had laid the groundwork. The winner in the four-player game moved from behind the 50-yard-line, as it were, to win in a single move. (Admittedly he did have exactly the items that he needed to get there, and not by chance, I believe.) With experience, players should take more care to cover their tracks and keep others from profiting from their handiwork. While you can’t nobble someone directly by ushering their ice floe to the board’s edge, you can move empty floes to break a path.

One word about the bits: While the rope, fish, bears and explorers are all standard wood bits, the ice floes are laser-cut plastic, with sharply defined pack ice and cracks running toward the center. They look great, and a lot of care was obviously spent finding the right design. Conrad mentioned at the Expo that the floes were produced by a company in Chicago, then imported to the UK, only to now be shipped back to Chicago within the game for sale by Ludorum’s U.S. distributor, FRED.

Congrats to Conrad and Streets for a game well-received by the British gaming public, and good luck on bagging award #3 in 2009!

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