In space, no-one can hear you burp.
Hangry Blobfish From Mars - fresh from the guillotineHere’s another new game. So new, in fact that it only exists as a print & play Kickstarter.
A print & play game is a pre-production version, supplied as a .PDF file, which you, er.., print and play. On the plus side, it’s a low risk investment - £1 plus printing costs. I bought some 150gsm thin card, which turned out to be thick paper. I’ll go to 200 gsm stock next time. On the negative, it’s tricky getting the ‘cards’ a consistent size. We have a small guillotine from a laminating set, but it’s not really up to the job as it was hard to line up the paper, so some cards were odd sizes, and a couple utterly wrong.
The game is a set-building game – collect four ‘bait’ cards of a given type to catch one of 8 blobfish. Whoever has the most blobfish at the end wins. The subtlety is that the four cards must have corner blobs that match the coloured foods specified by the blobfish, arranged as a square. To make the whole thing challenging, the bait cards allow or enforce certain actions. You might spin one of your bait cards, steal somebody else’s card or even swap hands with another player. There are many possible actions of lesser or greater impact. Below you can see our first game in progress. As instructed by the rule sheet, we started the evening with pizza!
As you can see by the pointy-finger, we were still working out the mechanics. On the left, Hangry Blobfish wants to eat two pizzas and two doughnuts. Pointy-finger is very close – he has two pizzas and one doughnut in his set of four. He just needs to spin the one card and he’ll catch the blobfish. He didn’t stand a chance of getting it, as the two players on the left could wreck his hand.
After a while we got to appreciate how well put together this is for four players. Stealing cards, swapping hands and other interference cards are great fun. Anyone familiar with Exploding Kittens (the game, not the pastime) will feel at home with this mechanism. In the initial rounds of the game, it takes a while to get a blobfish, but as the piles of ‘bait’ grow, the quicker it moves, which builds the tension nicely.
All in all, Hangry Blobfish from Mars is a fun ice-breaker game to start an evening’s gaming.
A few days later, Janet & I played the game two-handed and it didn’t work so well. Some of the actions aren’t effective with two players and we feel that after a few games we’d know each other’s playing style. This is a common problem with multi-player games reduced to two players, and as we’d be unlikely to spend a night playing Hangry Blobfish, it’s not a deal breaker.
The last point I’d make is the artwork. The blobfish are really well drawn, but are too detailed for a white background. They (and the bait) need to be shown in their natural environment to make the images pop.
For a first attempt at creating a game, it’s very good and I’ll be investigating in a proper deck as soon as the next Kickstarter begins.