The newest roll and write from Schmidt Spiel has arrived! It’s available in German and I bought a copy off amazon.de. So welcome in friends to a game I really was excited for and well, you’ll see if you want to treat yourself to this game or not. 

From its outset, this game read like the GanzSchonClever and Silver & Gold (https://www.inquisitivemeeple.com/rolling-with-benny-silver-and-gold-hunting-for-treasure-in-islands-of-polyominos/) got together and made a super cool new game. Well, that’s not entirely true. What you have here is a game that is far more reminiscent of Viva Java: The Coffee Game: The Dice Game (Viva Java Dice, from here on). 

You roll your dice up to 3 times – that seems fine – keep any you want from roll to roll. The catch, after you have re-rolled the dice at least once, the other players may claim 1 of the dice you rolled to add to their cards. Good for those players. Here’s why it’s good. In this game, you are effectively creating a 3 by 3 grid of cards, sort of Kingdomino-esque. The cards you are placing have a B on the back or laurel leaves. The B cards add an ability for the player to change their dice, cool. The laurel leaves are Victory Points at the end of the game. 

Here’s the rub, you have to activate these cards by rolling specific dice combinations, even then you cannot place your dice, unless you can complete the whole card. I’m just going to lob this grenade in, going first is a huge disadvantage unless you can finish your entire card with your first roll, statistically very difficult. The laurel leaf cards are going to be much harder to complete, typically they require up to 8 dice. Which you can never complete in a single roll with 5 dice. So you really have to pay attention to what you have and what you need. This is a game of math all the way and normally, I love mathy games. 

Placement of laurel leaf cards is also critical as they want to be next to specific color cards, some of them anyway. Also if you don’t activate a card, it probably won’t count toward your scoring at the end. There are exceptions. 

You receive 4 cards, 2 each, at the outset of the game, keep 3, discard 1. Probably keep those 2 laurel leaf cards as you will need points at the end of the game to win. 

Then you have two options after you finish rolling, you can try to activate your card(s) as mentioned above, or you can buy a card from the center. There are 4 of each card type in the center with 2 of each costing 4 of the same dice value and 2 of each costing 3 of the same dice value. Yep, you have to spend your quad or your trip to get another card. Could you have used those dice to complete and potentially score one of your other cards? Yes probably. In multiplayer this really isn’t so bad as the cards move and everything seems to have purpose, in solo play this is really not an idea I’m fond of. You could also instead of placing 2 dice have taken the top card blindly from either deck and added it to your grid or discarded it (yay free card, but you don’t get to place those 2 much needed dice).

Basically in solo play, you are playing a campaign with extremely rigid goals. The first level, you have to get 90 points in 15 rounds. A round is an active turn in which you roll your dice the usual way and if you reroll once or twice, you have access to fewer dice on the passive turn. Wait, if I’m extremely lucky, then I get more dice for being lucky? Yes. Here’s where solo really falls apart. Let’s assume you aren’t luck with dice (like me) and you get to that third roll and can place 2 dice. Yay! But on the passive turn you roll all 5 dice and can use 1 of those. If you were lucky and needed no rerolls, you can use 3, if you used 1 reroll you can have 2 of the dice. So you have to be lucky twice. If you are, you can effectively use 8 dice over the two turns. But you probably won’t get that lucky. At best you will use 3 dice, hopefully!, in those 2 turns. So if you aren’t lucky, you get 5 less dice. That is a huge margin considering most of these cards require up to 8 dice. 

To put it bluntly, I think the solo mode is terrible and this is why the game is leaving my collection. I literally seethed with anger. I haven’t wanted to flip the table as much as the last time I played Catan 14 years ago (it has been that long and no I won’t play it again). 

Here’s where this game shakes out for me, the multiplayer seems better as it is not a set number of rounds, you play until a player has played their 9th card, then play 1 more round. That’s pretty great. The thing is, I have a much loved and well worn NSV copy of Silver and Gold that is much more fun multiplayer and doesn’t drag like this game does. So why would I play something that isn’t as much fun? Well I wouldn’t. Again, it’s leaving my collection. 

So there we have friends, I wanted to love this game so very very much. I even jumped on amazon.de and made sure to grab it as soon as they had it available with my hard earned cash. And I am extremely disappointed in treating myself to this one. It’s going away, far far away to the land of Ohio. If however, this sounds like a game for you, treat yourself! Or treat yourself to something else! Either way, self-care is important. My self-care means this game no longer has a home with me because it doesn’t make me happy.