Author: Zubon

Kayak Chaos is a card and board game about racing down a river. The river unfolds over the course of play as kayaks reach the next segment. Cards let you move down or across the river or alter its course. A mix of strategy and randomization that seemed subject to a runaway leader effect, also with risks of kingmaker scenarios and piling on early leaders.

Gameplay is simple: play 3 of your 5 cards. Cards can provide movement, alter the river, or block altering the river (rarer). Movement is obviously valuable for getting ahead. Altering the river can make your course easier or impede your rivals. For example, you could shift the river over one space, which re-positions rocks or makes someone need to swerve to avoid the river bank, or you could flip a segment of the river to turn someone around. You can even switch two segments or river, pulling back a rival, leapfrogging ahead, or both.

Each of several boards is a short stretch of the river. Boards are revealed as a player gets past the current stretch of river, with that player picking how the new stretch is placed (from four options). This is the source of the runaway leader effect: once you are in the lead, you get free chances to arrange the rest of the board to your advantage. Of course, everyone gets those cards to rearrange the board, so if someone decides to slow you down rather than advancing themselves, an early leader might be severely punished and thrown back; my first game was a three-player game, so using your scarce turns to slow an opponent means not advancing yourself, and the third player clearly comes out ahead in that scenario. Perhaps this works out better with two or four players? With two, you capture all the benefits of slowing your opponent; with four, you can spread the costs. That dynamic is also the source of the kingmaker scenario, where a player left behind with no chance of winning can focus on making life easier or harder for other players.

Playing (or discarding) 3 of 5 cards in your hand each round means that there will be some interesting decisions but that luck drives a lot of the game. It seems somewhere around the balance between my demand for strategic play and others’ love of randomization, but it is also subject to swings like when I received one forward movement card out of ten cards, while at other times I could sweep through multiple boards in a turn due to favorable randomization. It might also fall into a middle that makes no one happy; I would need more games played to tell.

Basic rules are simple, but there are some complexities and interactions so this might be at the edge of what a casual player is willing to learn for a quick kayaking game. Also not quite as quick if a lot of people spend effort slowing down the leader, but game length can be customized by playing with a shorter river. Enjoyable with surprising depth for a game that looks so simple, but not so deep that a new player is lost or even notices much depth.

: Zubon

Pack & Stack is a game of loading trucks. Every round, you get a random assortment of boxes in different sizes, pick a truck from a random set flipped over, and try to get everything on the truck with as little empty space as possible. You lose points from an initial pool for unpacked boxes and empty space; highest score when someone counts down to 0 wins. The game makes good use of components and simultaneous play, has minimal interactivity, and is strongly subject to randomization. Potentially good for younger players or people who like luck-based games.

The components are good: boxes of five different sizes of colors, dice of corresponding colors with unusual numbers of pips per side, and solid truck boards. In many games, I go with the old idea of having a set of good components to use with many games, rather than whatever cheap pawns, money, etc. come with this box to justify its cost. (I have been using these coins for Seven Wonders, although I think I will be switching all my games’ money to Tech’s new coins.) The components here are essential to the game, well conceived, and of good quality.

Pack & Stack encourages simultaneous play, and if it had more dice, everything could be done simultaneously. You each roll to get your packages one at a time, then all flip trucks simultaneously, then all pack trucks simultaneously, and you can also score losses simultaneously if you trust everyone’s math and honesty. The only interactivity is the dash for trucks, and even then nothing is contested unless two players rolled similar stacks of boxes. Contrast games with no interaction that still officially have everyone acting in play order, or Seven Wonders with simultaneous play and some interaction.

Pack & Stack is mostly a luck-based game. Assuming that you have basic spatial relations skills and can perform single-digit arithmetic, you have all the skills needed for mastery, which you will achieve within five minutes. The one meaningful decision you make each round is which truck to pick, and unless the perfect truck is randomly available, your decision is arithmetic plus least bad choice. If you are on board with my contention that interesting decisions are the fun of gaming, this is not for you. If you like slot machines, this will be an exciting step up in your gaming; you even start with a pool of points and try to be the furthest from zero at the end, so it is like sitting next to your friends at the slots, pulling the bar to see how much you lose this time, and continuing until someone runs out of money and you leave. But you get to arrange little boxes on a truck, which is somewhat more fun than watching the game play itself.

Obviously not something I’m going to play again, but it has a few good uses of rules and could be attractive to some audiences. Its rules fit on a page, not in a book, and the game is not language-dependent, hence my thinking “good for kids?” (old enough not to try to swallow Legos).

: Zubon