BY SAGGYHEAD
HIGH RISK
Trevor Benjamin, Brett J. Gilbert
IELLO
2-4 Players
20 mins
Age 8+
High Risk is one of the small box mini games published by Iello. It is a game for 2 to 4 players aged 8+ that plays in 20 minutes. It is a push you luck race to the top of the mountain. You win by being the first player to get all four of your climbers to the top of the mountain.
Inside the box there are 6 custom dice, a small mountain board, 16 climber meeples, four in each colour, and a rulebook. The box is only palm-sized so it is perfect for travel. Turns in this game are pretty straight forward, you roll the six dice and check for a fall.
The D6 dice each have three danger lightning bolt symbols, two mountain ascend symbols and one weather symbol. If when you roll the dice you only get danger symbols on the dice you rolled, then that indicates a fall. If you don’t fall you may choose to climb based on the roll you made last or you can decide to push your luck and re roll all the dice with danger symbols that you last rolled. You need to make sure you don’t roll all danger symbols though as this will trigger a fall and end your turn.
When a player causes a fall, their highest climber that is not safe at the summit will fall to the next available space below their next highest climber. If you don’t have another climber on the route you will fall all the way to the bottom. This means you need to ensure you don’t only climb with one piece at a high time as you risk big falls, which will slow your progress in the race down.
If you land on the same spot as another climber, you will “knock them off” and they will drop down to the next available spot on the route. This means there is a lot of player interaction, which is really what you want in a small box family game. If you have ever enjoyed ludo, snakes and ladders or yahtzee, then pick up High Risk and give it a go. It’s a great game for the price point and one that I am happy to keep in my collection!
UNO FLIP
Mattel
2-10 Players
20-30 mins
Age 7+
There are a lot of people who hate the game UNO.
Apparently it is not cool to enjoy the mass produced non-purist games. But I say codswallop to that and will happily express how much I enjoy UNO. It is an easy to grasp and quick to play card game which has enough strategy to be enjoyable but not enough to require too much brain power. I like to play UNO when I feel drained, as it is easy to set up and easy to play. It doesn’t out stay its welcome and it can be played with kids as well as adults. This version plays 2-10 players aged 7+ and in my plays has lasted between 15 and 30 mins.
There have been a lot of UNO spin-off games over the years, we had one where instead of picking up cards you had to press the button a few times and it would spew out any number of cards at you. That made the game longer, but there was a serious thrill associated with pressing the button and seeing whether you’d be lucky or severely punished.
My favourite though has to be UNO Flip. I think I like this more than regular UNO. In this game, the cards are all double sided. One side shows the regular UNO red, blue, yellow and green, and the other side shows turquoise, orange, pink and purple. On this darker flipside, there are also some seriously seriously dangerous cards on the dark side which is fitting really. One of them lets you name a colour and the next player must draw cards until they get one of that colour. That could be 20 cards or just one.
If you enjoy quick light card play and have previously loved UNO then why not give this one a try for a literal “flip” on the classic.
THE MIND
Wolfgang Warsch
Coiledspring Games
2-4 Players
15 mins
Age 8+
Wolfgang Warsch is a powerhouse when it comes to modern board game design, he has made some of my favourites such as Quacks of Quedlinburg which I recently introduced Favourite Foe to. The Mind is more of a small box event perhaps than your typical game. During this game, you try to read each other’s minds to cooperatively play cards in ascending order. You lose if you play a card out of sequence.
The game consists of a deck of cards number 1-100, 12 level cards which tell you the changes in difficulty for the next round, 5 life cards and 3 throwing star cards. The throwing stars are a bit of a hail mary action to try and get out of a sticky situation, but they are quite hard to come by, so you must use them wisely.
Trouble is you can’t speak to each other about what cards you have. You are desperately trying to gesture to the other players with a series of eyebrow raises that you have a 54 and a 78 in your hand. Aside from eyebrow morse code, you need to pause long enough to scope out whether you have the lowest card left to play and ensure you play it at the right time.
This is a co-operative event more than most games, and it is great fun for 2 to 4 players aged 8+. Playtime is anything from a few minutes if you guys just aren’t on the same wavelength to around 15 to 30 minutes if you are actually excellent at it.
Our experience is that we play a few times trying to get further each time, we as yet have not made it up to the final round, so there is big mileage left for us even just as a two-player. Each round gets progressively more difficult as more cards are dealt to each player, upping the ante after each success.
I love this kind of game arc where winning a round pushes you to try a harder one. If you like the idea of trying something completely different that is a bit of an event rather than a game, then check out The Mind.
