Do you know your Reckless Cheese from your Dr Livingstone? How about your Mr Soldier from your Undercover Fish? Thinking about kicking back with a Pina Cubelada and listening to some Wikiwiki Dinosaur? Well buddy have I got good news for you…!
Introduction
Cubitos has been a long-standing favourite in our house. As a family that loves Quacks, having the push-your-luck element in a whimsical dice format is a delight. It did get to a point where it started to feel a bit ‘comfortable’ despite the endless (well, 5.7 million) combinations on offer. The Fowl Play expansion is here to slap you around a bit and have you pay the utmost attention to The Honorable Pigeoty-Wigeoty. Are you ready?
What’s new? And what’s not?
Well, it’s all technically new, but there are some familiar things and some shinier things within this slim box.
Taking the familiar things first, we have two brand new cards for each of the original eight colours of dice, bringing them up to nine cards each in total. Obviously they’re all ridiculously named, but Benjamin The Pineapple and Shama-Llama-Ding Dong are the two standout ones for me personally. There’s also two extra dice per original colour, and a bunch more light/dark grey dice as well – winner.
Next up we have… TWO NEW PLAYER COLOURS! This means your epic races can now be run with six players instead of four. I think this kind of addition is often overlooked, but racing games are better with more people (to a point obviously – an infinite number of people will slow you down), and there was never much of a logical reason for me that this was limited to being a 4-player game. I’m really glad they’ve added this in.
There’s also a new double-sided track board which introduces Island Hopper and Pits and Perils, as well as an interesting way to expand/extend your play which I’ll cover below.
And yes, there are two new colours of dice (teal pigeon and pink flamingo) and seven cards apiece for them. I’m not sure why these weren’t bumped to nine cards each just to be consistent with what’s been introduced as extras for the original cards but I’m not looking a gift flamingo in the mouth, that’s for sure. You also get 12 new dice per colour, and two of the frustrating cardboard boxes to keep it all in.
The final cherry on the icing on the cake is that this will all fit in the base game box, which feels like a wonderful surprise until you realise the dice boxes, once built would never fit back in the expansion box. Either way, more stuff, no more shelf space!
Where to start?
At the start line I suppose? So let’s cover the tracks first. There’s a new type of space called a pitfall. You can move through these no problem, but ending your movement on one means you have to take a grey die of your choice and add it to your Discard Zone, reintroducing some clutter into your otherwise shiny and bright dice pool.
Pits and Perils is a winding, narrow track that will have everyone jostling for position and possibly prioritising any blue dice that support water movement if they’re in play. Island Hopper gives you the chance to take advantage of portals to jump from one island to another meaning there’s more than one way to the finish line, with different bonuses to tempt you along the way.
What’s really interesting about the map design in particular is the ability to create a ‘marathon race’ by linking maps together to create an extra-long race. The rules suggest linking Island Hopper and the Ahead Of The Curve map from the base game, but the art on Still Waters Run Deep also lines up well enough (though takes up a bit more table space). Whether you’d necessarily want to do this in a 6-player game is personal preference, but there’s an obvious warning that it could extend the game somewhat.
Decision Pigeon
Let’s get to the cards and dice – the filling in this cubey sandwich if you will. Both Pink Flamingo and Teal Pigeon (never getting tired of that by the way…) introduce a new type of symbol on their respective dice (beyond the picture of the birds to activate the card in the first place)
Two of the Pink Flamingo cards have power abilities. Quick side-bar here if you’re occasionally a little inattentive to the nuance of the die symbols. Regular picture of critter is a regular action – no big deal. Picture of critter with four dots around it is a power symbol. Generally these can activate at different points in a turn depending on the card so paying close attention to the timing can be important. I say that for me as much as anyone else as I get a bit frenzied with rolling all the dice and can occasionally forget.
Anyway, the Pink Flamingo power symbol means you have to sacrifice a movement point in your earlier Run Phase in order to use the ability. Basically you must have rolled at least one footprint to take advantage of it. As always, whether that’s worth it will be wildly situational, but the cards with this ability either give you +1 attack for evaluating red dice or allow you to add two more dice to your roll. I’m no expert but I’m fairly sure more dice is always better
The Teal Pigeon is a little more straightforward to understand, having no power symbol or comparatively complex conditions to think about. The new symbol here allows you to gain a credit as opposed to a money like the other cards. Quick rules refresh – money values in circles cannot be carried over from round to round, whereas credit values in squares can be banked and accrue. This feels like a superficial rule, but with the oddly priced cards and oftentimes difficult nature of spending down all your money in a pleasing way in the base game, this is a welcome addition to let you stockpile and
Final thoughts from Tyrannical Justice Coo
There’s not a lot more to say before his worship passes down judgement. Really it’s a classic “more of what you love” expansion without any kind of bloat of learning a bunch more rules. For context, the rule booklet is 4 pages long One page covers the contents, one pages covers five new suggested card combos, mixing in the new and existing cards and one page has card clarifications for some of the new cards in the expansion. About half of the first page is dedicated to explaining the new stuff (and that’s really about three paragraphs all told).
So what that means is you can unpack it, chuck it all together and get going in double quick time. That in itself is a rare thing for almost any expansion to any game so plus points for that.
What it’s really doing (and why I really like it) is offering a fresh lick of paint and that baking bread/fresh coffee smell to a well loved title. If you’ve played a lot of Cubitos, chances are that despite the dozens of combinations, you’ve gravitated towards a few cards that you really like and when push came to shove you’ve gone back to the old favourite Reckless Cheese rather than giving Ledercheesen a rare outing. We all like the comfort and familiarity and that’s no bad thing. But people like me are a sucker for something new and a bit of a push to get stuck into something new and I can tell you that pairing Count Flapula, The Honorable Feathers McDoo and PiNOWple with some of my trusty faves is the nudge I need.
If you were ambivalent to Cubitos as a base game, this won’t really change your mind. But if you loved watching those dice go flying hither and yon then the knowledge of more colours, more card variety and two new tracks is probably going to sell you quicker than these 1400 words will!
