If you’ve read my other blogs on this site you know I like games that can slip into pockets and lunch breaks. These next five are the most diminutive yet!
Sea Salt and Paper
You don’t see many games these day that are just a deck of cards, much less a game whose set up can be done with a flick of the wrist: slam the box down in the middle of the table, leave the deck right there, flip over the top two cards and you are good to go buster.
On your go you either take one card from one of the two discard piles or two blind cards from the draw deck and dump the one you want less.
What you’re trying to get are sets and these come in three different flavours. Firstly a simple majority, you start hoovering up shell cards and the more you get the more points, or maybe octopi; who are rarer and worth more. After that are modifier cards, worthless on their own but combo nicely with others, 2 points per boat card and so on.
The last type are what puts the salt into Sea Salt & paper: the Duo cards. These little fiends pair up and give you an instant power up, a bonus card, an extra go or pair up a swimmer & shark to steal a card of your opponent. Se Salt is also one of the rare games where the expansion is basically mandatory as that’s where the spiciest duos are.
If you top 7 points you can shout ‘stop’ on your go to end the round, potentially cutting your opponents off at the knees. This is what gives Sea Salt its zip, that you’re set-collecting against the clock, and messing with the other players sets the whole time.
It runs so fast you barely have time to appreciate the darling little origami that makes up the art.
Mindspace
I wish the many pressures and responsibilities of my life fit together as snugly as tetris blocks, and that some of them disappeared when I inserted a long one.
Anyway.
Mindspace is a roll n’ write of jamming tetris pieces into a grid that’s supposed to represent a human brain. The different coloured pieces combo in different ways and you get point bonuses for filling sections of your brain; along with penalties for empty spaces at games end.
Each round starts with a roll of dice that dictates what tetriminos are available to pick and in what colours: green blocks give you coins for special abilities, orange blocks give points for every purple block their next to and so on. Along with those 3 sub goal cards get randomly dealt out and the start. So plenty to chew on considering you’re just scribbling different blocks onto a grid.
It’s a game that scales well as it’s simultaneous play and players don’t mess with each other much, so you get the same experience at 2 all the way up to 6 (?). An abstract puzzely treat in a compact package.
Tiger & Dragon
Tiger & Dragon looks like a game that’s been played in smokey tea houses for centuries but was actually cooked up by oink back in 2021, albeit inspired by the 19th century Japanese game of Goita.
When laid out it immediately evokes mah-jong but actually has more in common with Uno.
The aim is to be the first player to get rid of all your lovely, clacky Bakelite tiles. Said tiles come in easy-to-remember sets: there’s 1 tile of 1, 2 of 2 and so on up to 8 of 8 tiles, plus 2 wilds. These all get evenly split plus a remainder in the middle: so you never have perfect information.
Then the starting play ‘attacks’ with a tile, the next player ‘blocks’ with a same value tile, whereupon their now the attacking player or they pass and the next player has the opportunity to block or pass. If the passing gets all the way around back to the attacker they get to discard a tile for free and go again.
Play continues till a player plays their last tile and wins the round. That last tile dictates the points depending on what score sheet you’re playing with.
It’s a rule set that’s so boiled down it transcends the hobby scene and ventures into the classical realm of parlour games like chequers or bridge. Laid out its the kind of game that’d garner a sideways glance from your gran.
Games run fast, clocking in at 5 minutes sometimes. With the sets so straightforward it’s easy to track what’s been played and the likelihood of someone having just the right tile to block you, so it all comes down to timing, taking control of the round and playing just the right tile at just the right time. Ending on the 1 tile is the hardest way to win (there is just 1 of them after all) but, unlike any of the other tiles, it nets you an instant win and elicits groans from your opponents.
Tiger & Dragon is a game you could play with anyone. And you should.
Sly
Sly & my last pick could evade even the most thorough cavity search. Sly is a game of gobbling up your opponents chickens whilst trying to protect your own.
You do this chiefly by bluffing. Everyone has a handful of hens and one fox, on your go you can lay one of your cards face down at the hen house, try to expose another players fox by flipping one of their played cards or revealing a set amount of cards with a revealed fox running off with the most valuable hen and the 2nd most valuable then becoming safe in the hen house.
This last action is where all the slyness manifests; working to set up a dash for the hen house with a high value hen whilst trying to suss out where your opponents may have set up an ambush. At the same time you don’t want to overextend, your fox can steal a lot of points but if someone guess’s correctly where you’re planning to strike they can capture your fox, nabbing points for themselves and considerably de-fanging you for the rest of the game.
With a run time of about 10 to 15 minutes Sly is a game best played multiple times back to back, with the bluffs and double-bluffs becoming more audacious with each session.
Irk
Irk is an area majority set-collection game that really strips it back to the nuts & bolts. Each slim little card holds 3 random symbols, the differently coloured shapes score points whilst grey crosses score nothing but act as connective tissue for the colour symbols.
The rounds alternate between playing a card to a shared central area or adding a card to your personal portfolio; the colours you intend to score with.
Because everyone is piling cards into a shared area, and can see what each other are investing in, it can quickly become vindictive; splitting up clusters of colours and covering bonus scoring symbols.
Players can find themselves scrabbling to invest in colours on the ascendency, riding others coat-tails or trying to shore up the 1 or 2 colours they’ve gone all in on.
The sparse graphic style underlays a spiky and dramatic area control game that goe beyond it’s gum packet dimensions
