Playing the haul from Spiel!

This tactical combat game for 2-4 players takes about 30 minutes to play.

Its last year’s follow-up to the game that debuted at Spiel two years ago “Fold-it”.  Its ancestor was an innovative game that involved playing restaurant chefs competing to fulfil orders. The core mechanic were these clever pieces of cloth that each player got. Each close was split into a grid of various food dishes. You had to fold along the lines to correctly to only show exactly what had been ordered by the customer. It was a frantic game where the order card was flipped and everyone was then scrambling to correctly fold their cloth to match the required order and grab a wooden token until none were left and that player lost a life. A nice mix of puzzle solving and dexterity.

This game takes that same mechanic but uses it to drive part of a small tactical combat game. You can play as one of four heroes, each with different special abilities, (and importantly unique cloth patterns). When the card is flipped giving you the target icons you need to show, how fast you match it will determine your position in the initiative order, and which icons you have showing will determine what extra actions you have available. There are wildcards on some of the target patterns, which means when you get really good you can start trying to think what would be tactically useful as an extra action this turn.  You might turn up traps that deal you damage, a treasure that will give you a one-use card from the treasure deck,  or bonus movement, healing or attacks.

Each hero gets a unique passive ability, a unique cloth (so the assassins cloth features slightly more treasure than others for example), and a unique attack. You move around the board and try and kill the other players before they kill you. For 3+ players there is also a ghost mode that helps mitigate player elimination. Dead players become ghosts and get a different set of abilities and different winning conditions. They can no longer harm the living, but they can still interact with other players and have a way to reach victory.

Aside from needing to stick on the character stickers for the wooden chits you use to represent them on the board, the component quality is quite decent. The pieces of cloth are made of the same excellent non-creasing material that was used in Fold-It.

We’ve played the game a few times with friends, and overall I would say its a fun enough game. It probably goes on about 10 minutes too long for the level of simplicity of most of the mechanics in the game. It’s a nice evolution of Fold-It, but it’s not really got enough depth to its mechanics to compete as an interesting tactical game.