Dale Yu

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In each round, the same 4 steps are cycled thru: Step 1: Call of Fate – Players look at thru their hands and secretly and simultaneously select any number of cards which share a symbol in the upper corners (icon could be cards, relics, room tiles, fate stick). The possibilities include: causing your opponent to discard fate sticks, peeking or swapping relic tiles, adding fate points to your count, rotating/moving/swapping room tiles, adding or removing cards from a hand, etc. Again, the game ends when one of three things happens 1] a player has all three cursed relics visible – that player automatically loses (Regardless of VP count) 3] a player has 9 room tiles in their temple – the player with the most points showing wins; ties go in favor of the player who placed the ninth room tile. You can play them for the fate sticks or you can hold onto them and hope to play their card action if you get naga results on your fate sticks.

In this game, each player is a cute squirrel (one brown and one black), and they stand in a forest – which it initially made up of a 3×3 grid with 2 cards stacked in each location. After you get a card, either from the top of a neighboring space OR from your opponent’s hand, you then check your own hand of cards. Initially, it’s just guesswork to find some acorns (probably just like being a squirrel in real life), but then once you start filling your hand with valuable cards, then there’s a little bit of strategy that comes into play. If you have two “1 acorn” cards, do you take a risk and try to bluff a bit to drop one down to then try to trick your opponent into possibly squandering a turn for a 1/3 chance at only a “1 acorn” card?

One person has the monster card, and you’re using card powers to ensure that no player ever has the monster card at the start of their turn (as the game is then lost), relying on turn skip powers, card-redistributions, change in turn order, and the like. There’s a nice cycle that develops – track going out, scoring, track coming off, scoring, track going back out, and so on. I enjoyed the game and would be happy to play again; I’m just not sure there’s enough of a learning curve to sustain the game into lots of repeat play. It has a laborious setup, and there are serious questions over whether the skill of the bluff outweighs the luck, but I’ve kept the game to play with my boys when the time came and we finally pulled it out last holidays and gave it a solid run.