What is it about?
Ever sat down with a lovely portion of chips on the seafront and find you’ve been quickly surrounded by some hungry seagulls? Well this is your opportunity to be the seagull and beat your fellow gull opponents to take your share of the food.
Beaks comes in a travel size tin with great artwork and four hungry gulls cheekily waiting to eat the contents.
Set up
Beaks contains very simple contents, 40 items of food made from painted wood in bright colours, 24 order cards printed like paper ‘chippy’ tickets and 6 yellow plastic tweezers (the beaks). The food are packaged in a on theme brown paper bag. The simplicity of the contents are perfectly suited to the game and make it a lovely purchase that is sure to bring seaside memories to those that play and have experienced a chippy tea by the beach.
Easy to set up, put all the food pieces in a pile in the centre of the playing area within reach of all players (gulls). Shuffle the order cards, place two cards face up per person in the playing area in a circle around the food.
Put the remaining order cards in a draw pile to the side.
“3, 2, 1…..Squaaaaaaawk!”
Each order card lists the food required to complete the order, the TOTAL is the number of points the order is worth.
← For example this order requires the gull to pick up 1 pizza piece, 1 sausage piece and 3 chip pieces, once successfully collected this order will give the gull 4 points.
With beaks held in the air, the gulls countdown to start the game “3, 2, 1…..Squaaaaaaawk!, all the gulls rush to grab the food required.
Each item can only be picked up using the beaks (yellow tweezers) one at a time and placed in front of them, some of the pieces are tricky to pick up due to their shape making some orders harder to complete than others.
Any gull can complete any order face up on the table, any gull can pick up food either from the central pile or from the other gulls (your opponents!)
To complete an order the correct food items required need to be in front of the gull and again raising their beak in the air they SQUAWK loudly. All the other gulls stop immediately and drop any food in their beaks back onto the central food pile, they also raise their beaks and squawk.
Flock validation
The gull that has completed the order collects the order card and places it next to their food collection, the flock of gulls validate that the correct number of items are present.
Flock validation is successful then put the order card to the side so it can’t be picked by anyone else, put the collected food back into the central food pile, take a new order card from the draw pile and add it to the main playing area.
If flock validation was unsuccessful and the order was not completed correctly, the gull must start again and return all the food collected back to the pile and the order card goes back into play.
Gull attack
If two gulls complete orders at the same time and they are different orders then they keep their complete order card respectively. However if the order cards are the same, neither gull wins and all the food is returned and no one wins on that turn.
Scoring
Each completed order accumulates points, as per the order card TOTAL. The first gull to reach 10 points is the winner…..however, if a gull has surplice food when completing an order for example only needs 2 chips and yet has 3 chips in their pile they have wasted food. For each wasted food item 1 point is subtracted from the order TOTAL.
Final Thoughts
A fun but noisy game to play, the small packaging allows the game to be taken easily to other venues. Just make sure your venue doesn’t mind a bit of noise and laughter. This is a game for all, but especially a good game to get teenagers entertained.
Variations
There are two variations to make the game longer or more challenging:
1. Play a set number of rounds and the winner is the gull with the most points at the end of the rounds
2. To make the game more challenging agree to stack the food items to complete the order.
