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Every week the EFG staff will be defining a gaming term that is either confusing or ill-defined. Please leave a comment with any terms you are confused by and we will try to include them in future editions!


The gaming definition this week is a term that is applicable to board and card games: Godzilla the Board/Deck

Godzilla the Board/ Deck is a term used in board and card games to describe the action of knocking the items askew. If a player Godzillas the deck, they have knocked a pile or piles of cards over. To Godzilla the board is to knock over or displace tiles, meeples, cubes, or other game components.

When playing games with kids or clumsy adults (like me) having a player Godzilla the Board or Deck may be a common occurrence. The key feature differentiating a player Godzilla-ing the Board or Deck verses disrupting the game in anger is motivation. Godzilla-ing is an unintended action due to clumsiness, and emotion is not a factor.

Games with more pieces, small pieces or pieces/cards which need to be placed on top of one another are more susceptible to be Godzilla-ed. Tile laying games are also easily to Godzilla the board as players place a tile and knock a bunch out of place.

Strategies to minimize Godzilla-ing the board/deck

  • Keep the pieces and cards within easy reach of players
  • If motor skills are a challenge for one or more players, minimize the number of pieces that they need to interact with
  • Space out components as much as possible.
  • If possible, avoid players having to reach across the board, and instead have the player(s) get up and move around the table.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments and let us know your thoughts!

You can also look at our other board game definitions from previous weeks here!

What do you think? Sound off in the comments and let us know your thoughts!

Make sure to keep your eyes on Engaged Family Gaming for all of the latest news and reviews you need to Get

Your Family Game On!

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For anyone who has thought about getting a tattoo, No Regerts lets you enjoy tattoos without the pain or expense!  No Regerts is a tattoo themed card game by Poisonfish Games. It is a two-six player game for ages 12 and up with game play taking between 25-45 minutes.  The object of the game is to fill you “body” represented by card placement on the table around a formation card with cool tattoos and avoid “lame” tattoos.  Players gain and loose points based on the tattoos they collect.

Contents

  • 216 cards;
    • 100 Positive tattoos
    • 76 Negative Tattoos
    • 36 Modifyers
    • 6 Formation Cards

Gameplay

To begin the game, each player draws five cards, and places a formation card in front of them.  The formation card helps to organize the placements of the cards for each body part as it gains tattoos.  There are two arms, two legs, chest, and back to be covered. The person with the most tattoos goes first.  If no one has any tattoos each player rolls a die (not provided )to determine who starts. Each turn is comprised of four steps.

  1. Get a Tattoo: To get a positive tattoo on your “body” you need to “pay” by discarding another positive tattoo card or a modifier card.  You may only start one body part per turn but can add to existing tattooed parts.  The maximum is 3 tattoos per body part. If you can not play a positive tattoo card, you need to play a negative tattoo card, and there is no “fee”.  If you are unable to get a tattoo you must discard two cards, and then draw back up to your maximum hand.
  2. Open Play: You can play an additional tattoo on yourself if you have another tattoo card to pay for it.   Modifiers can be played at this point. If you have a Bad Advice card you can put a negative tattoo on another player.  One card must remain in your hand at the end of this step.  
  3. Discard: Discard one card
  4. Refresh: Draw back up to your max hand size (5 cards unless you have a modifier that changes that number)   

The game ends when one player has filled all available spaces on their body (3 tattoos each space).  The person who ends the game earns 5 extra points.  Then everyone adds the points from positive tattoos and subtracts their negative tattoo ;points to determine who has the highest number of points, and the player with the highest number of points is the winner.

Family Game Assessment

This is an entertaining player versus player card game.  The artwork of the cards is beautiful and detailed.   The tattoos represented are not “adult” themed but some are a bit suggestive. Therefore, players should follow the recommended ages 12 and up. Both the topic and game mechanics against other players make this a better game form older kids.  This is not a game I would feel comfortable playing with younger kids, but is great for families with older children.  Even though each turn has multiple steps it is an easy game to learn, especially for an experienced gamer.  A good understanding of the range of tattoo and enhancement cards allows deeper strategy to be used both for building your own tattoos, and thwarting your opponents.

Conclusion

For a family who appreciates the art of tattoos No Regerts is a great addition to your collection.  While not an optimal game for young players, it is a fun family game that older children and adults can play together and enjoy the theory of tattooing without the commitment of the real thing.

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Taco vs Burrito by Hot Taco Enterprises is our Kickstarter Campaign of the week! No joke… this is a card game designed by a seven year old boy named Alex Butler. It is the ULTIMATE food fight on game night!

Game play is straight forward. Players draw cards and add wacky foods to their taco or their burrito to earn points. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins. There are gotcha cards that can mess with your opponents strategy so it isn’t THAT simple. I think the theme is funny enough and the cards are cute enough to keep me interested regardless.

I still can’t get over the fact that this game was designed by a 7 yr old. This kid is less than two years older than my daughter and he has already designed a successfully Kickstarted card game? That’s just crazy! I’m looking forward to playing this game just to see where this kid’s head was during design.

Taco vs Burrito launched on Kickstarter with a modest goal and reached it in three hours! This is a cool looking filler game at a low price.

 

 

Take a look at the campaign video below! If for nothing else… do it for the Taco costume!

What do you think? Sound off in the comments and let us know your thoughts!

Make sure to keep your eyes on Engaged Family Gaming for all of the latest news and reviews you need to Get Your Family Game On!

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Rage of the Trolls is a standalone expansion to the Gruff game system coming to Kickstarter on 05/30/2017.

Gruff is a tactical card game that has been around for a few years now. The game puts an interesting spin on the Billy Goats Gruff bedtime story. If you recall the three Billy Goats Gruff used their wits to outsmart an evil troll so they could cross a bridge. In the game’s universe this victory was noticed by the shepherds nearby. They decided that they would use selective breeding, magic, and technology to help turn the goats into an army of … very weird soldiers.

Gruff: Rage of the Trolls expands on the franchise by giving players a chance to cooperate against monstrous trolls for the first time. The mechanics themselves are simple. Players set everything up as normal and place the troll in between the two players. The troll acts using behavior cards that are drawn and played during each player’s turn. Each card has a series of actions and effects that are triggered based on the trolls “rage” stat.

The troll’s rage stat increases on each players turn and this has an impact on the damage it deals and the number of actions on its behavior card that it will take. The troll gets very dangerous quickly during each game as its rage meter increases. Players who aren’t careful will have their gruffs taken out quickly.

These mechanics do make for an interesting cooperative experience. Our playtesting team felt challenged and encouraged to really study their shepherds, gruffs, and cards to make sure they were playing with optimal strategies. Its a great feeling to be forced to make adjustments between games like this because the thrill of victory is a great payoff for experimentation.

With all that said, the troll mechanics were a bit difficult to follow because they added several steps to each round ,compared to the main Gruff games, that kept our team from ever really feeling comfortable. This wasn’t enough to keep us from playing, but it was frustrating until we were able to get the rhythm straight.

Is it a kids’ game?

While I don’t think there is anything in particular about the game that is questionable, I do encourage parents to take a look at the art for the game. The battle goats are beautifully drawn, but they are definitely weird. Parents will know if a particular character would be problematic. The only time I would imagine this to be the case is if your child has an odd or unexpected phobia. These critters are definitely dark, but they are not gory,

There is nothing in this game, outside of maybe the artwork, that is any more objectionable than Magic: The Gathering or Yu Gi Oh. Your family can play this game with confidence.

Can kids play it?

Rage of the Trolls is slightly more complicated than the base game. The addition of the troll “boss monsters” add several different steps to each turn that made it harder for out play testers to keep track of things. This added complexity could have a negative impact on the experience for some younger players.

Conclusion

We may have had our difficulties with the cooperative aspects of the game, but this is a must own expansion for fans of the Gruff series. It includes two new Shepherds and six new battle goats that are fully compatible with the rest of the Gruff games.

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Originally published on Social Mathematics and republished with the author’s permission.

As a gamer, the holidays give me opportunities to play games with non-gamers. People like my family. Or, more relevantly to this article, people like my niece. Here’s what you need to know about my niece: she is 6 years old who really loves to play games, begot from gamer parents. This year we played Simon’s Cat. hedgehogsAnd because she is 6, we played Simon’s Cat a lot. (The hedgehogs were my favorite.) And, as a mathematician and a gamer, I have to say that Simon’s Cat has a fair amount of game for its simple rules system.

Playing games with a 6 year old, as an adult, can be challenging. Mostly because they aren’t playing games at this age. They are playing experiences. Chutes and Ladders is most definitely an experience, not a game. Despite all those fabulous ladders and exciting chutes, the game is just a very complicated randomizer. It’s basically the Rube Goldberg machine of coin flips. It hurts my brain when a child is sad because they “lost” experiences like this. I just want to say, “You only had 1/2 a chance. There was literally nothing you could do to avoid this fate.”

I think a game gets to be called a game if and only if the choices you make as a player influence your ability to win or lose.   So, the question of the hour is: Is Simon’s Cat a game or an experience? Let’s cover the components and the rules.  Here are all the cards in the deck arranged in a pleasing way:

all_the_cards

You are dealt a portion of the deck. Whomever has the Pink Cat 3 plays it to the center.  Next, you go around the table and if you have a card that is the same color or the same number, then you can play it. If more than one card is playable, then you pick which one to play.  If you don’t have any cards that you can play, you collect all the cards from the middle of the table. These cards all count as 1 mess that you had to clean up. If you collected a mess, then you play any card you want to the table.  Suffice to say, you play a card every time it’s your turn, but you want to collect as few messes as possible. Once all the cards are played, the player with the fewest messes wins! Got it? If you want the official rules, you can find those here.

A game has a game if and only if the choices you make as a player influence your ability to win or lose.

In order for this to be a real game, my choices have to influence my chances of winning.  Thus, there must to be some strategy to the order I play my cards that is better than another.  Is my chance of winning higher when I use a good strategy than it is for me to randomly chose a usable card?

A slightly different way to ask this question is: Are some cards more valuable than others? Can some cards be used in more situations? If there are cards which are more valuable, then I want to keep those in my hand as long as possible for increased flexibility in the late game.  However, if all cards are equally valuable, then there won’t be a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ strategy and Simon’s Cat isn’t a real game (as far as I’m concerned anyways!)

gnomesSince I can only play a card if the previous card shares a color or number, I want to know which card has the most other cards which share a number or color: the most similar cards.  Let’s consider the Gnomes. There are only two Gnomes in the game. At first, this may appear to be valuable. (Because you can block others perhaps?) But remember, your main goal is to not get messes. So, you are most concerned with whether a card is playable by you or not. The Green Gnome 1 is only playable off of the Green Gnome 2, Orange Mouse 1, and Purple Dog 1. This means there are three cards in the deck which can precede the Green Gnome 1.

What about my personal favorite, the Yellow Hedgehog 3? Yellow Hedgehog 3 can play off of any of the five other yellow cards or any of the four other 3s. Thus, there are nine cards that a Yellow Hedgehog 3 can play off of. This means that between Green Gnome 1, with three similar cards and Yellow Hedgehog 3, with nine similar cards, the Yellow Hedgehog 3 is a more valuable card. Except, these can’t be used in the same situation.  So, we’ve shown that cards have different valuable-ness, but we haven’t shown that this will ever matter.

Let’s consider an example.  Let’s say the card played before my turn was a Yellow Hedgehog 3.  I have a Blue Kitten 3 in my hand and an Orange Mouse 3.  Which one should I play? Well, the Blue Kitten 3 has eleven similar cards.  Orange Mouse 3 only has seven.  Assuming we don’t know any more information about what was played previously, it would be a better choice to play the Orange Mouse 3 because there are more cards that can trigger my Blue Kitten 3 than my Orange Mouse 3. So, in this moment of our investigation, we know that there will be a strategy which is better than random. That means Simon’s Cat is an actual game! I can make a better or worse decision. I can impact my fate! Thank you, Steve Jackson Games, for making a simple game (without reading!) that is still a game. Seriously. Thank you.

Before we go into the bonus lightning round, I have to insert an aside for the other gamer mathematicians out there: for surely you have already determined that which card is the most valuable is not just a function of the total cards in the deck, as I presented above.  Returning to my example: if all the other Blue cards had already been played, then (in that moment) the Orange Mouse 3 is actually a better play because, at the moment, Blue Kitten 3 is not at the top of her game.  All her friends have already been played to the table!  So, she is less valuable.  To those of you who thought of this, excellent work! Your insight also further proves that there is a real game to be had here.

Now for the first bonus round:

Bonus Question: Which card begins the game as the most valuable card? Can you figure it out by looking at all the available cards in the deck?  You can go look. Take a guess!

Answer: Hopefully you figured out it had to be a Pink Catsimon_cat3 because Pink has the most cards in its color.  And the most valuable card should also be a 3 or 4 so it shares the most colors across a single number. Thus, the 2 most valuable cards are the Pink Cat 3 and Pink Cat 4.  Except you will never get to play the Pink Cat 3 on another card, because it must be played first.  Thus, the most powerful card is the Pink Cat 4. Notably, Pink Cat 4 is the only Pink Cat who isn’t doing something crazy in the graphic on the card.  Therefore, I am left with no other option than to assume that Simon’s real cat is Pink Cat 4.

 

And the final bonus round:

Reader be warned! It is very possible to be dealt a hand of cards and preceding cards in a way which allows no choices. In this situation, we, the adults, suck it up and “play” our gaming experience. Simon’s Cat has more game than most of the games I played over the holidays, but it’s still a game which can be explained in 3 sentences. It’s bound to have some flaws. For a game which can be played with pre-readers, it gets high marks from me!

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