Thursday 18 July 2013

Playing with the wife!

No calm down it's not a post about marital relations but a review of Hey, that's my Fish! I played against Amanda (one of the reasons I picked it up was that she really liked the look of it and that doesn't happen very often!). But the question is was it £10 well spent or another game I can't get the wife to play? 

Hey, that's my new game!
Gameplay:
You set up the hexagonal ice flow (each has a number of fish on it) tiles in a roughly square shape with the first line eight long. You then set up your team of penguins one at a time on a tile containing only one fish. Each player gets to move one fish in a straight line and collects the tile they moved off from. When a player can no longer move any of his penguins he removes his whole team and is out. Once all players are out the game ends and the player with the most fish wins.

My favourite is the little fellow screaming because he hasn't got a single fish! 
Loving constructed by my glamorous assistant. 
Yes I made an error during deployment, no I still don't know  what it was.
That's what winning looks like, I wasn't the blue team.
When the stacks twice as high should you even bother counting?

Amanda and I played a three game series and I lost 2 to 1 (45-43 Amanda, 45-36 me, 56-33 Amanda, yeah I was whipped in the last game). Each one was about 6-15 minutes long.


As a little experiment I recorded the second game and have put it through iMovie to speed it up and stick a little musical number on there that makes me smile (Sorry Mr Faulkner but I really love your song so using it is kind of a compliment).



Things I liked:

- Despite the exceptionally simple rules there are lots of complex choices and strategies and you can quickly go from feeling confident to the realisation you just lost (though that could just be my inability to read the game!).
- The player counters are great and full of character and the design of the counters makes it really easy to differentiate them. 
- I'm not a great fan of elimination mechanics but the games are so quick that it works, though if you are an analysis paralysis suffer you could easily suck the fun out of the game.
Don't be fooled by that dip in the middle it doesn't even go half way down the depth of the box!  Plus if you line the tiles up rather than chuck them in the bag they take up even less space!

Things that made me go hmm:

- Only one thing which is that the box is so huge for so few components (it could fit in some of the larger deck boxes!). I know they need to maintain a strong presence on the shelf and I really love the box cover (the thing that attracted Amanda to it) so it makes sense but you could feel a bit disappointed. It was only £10 so it's not a money issue, more that the game takes up a lot of space when it doesn't need to.

4/5 Daves

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