Category: Two player

We first played Flyin’ Goblin back in January, the day it was gifted to Mom, and we’ve played it many times since. This is mainly because there are catapults involved.

Yes, you heard that right. Catapults! The “Flyin'” part of Flyin’ Goblin is quite literal; gameplay involves launching your Goblin meeples into the castle so they can pillage the Rooms they land in. Coins are used to recruit more to the cause, be they more soldiers to fling, the Captain, to fling with doubled effects, or Robbers, who chill on Roofs and burgle a Diamond a turn. Diamonds are one of the victory conditions; your other option is to build all tiers of the Totem without your opponents knocking it down. (The Totem also sits on a rooftop, and costs Coins to build.)

The actual catapulting is a mix of accuracy and speed – you want to land in specific Rooms, certainly, but you also want to launch all your Goblins! Everyone starts this step at the same time, and continue at their own pace until all but one player have called out “Finished!” The last player then gets one more launch.

Alongside resource Rooms, there are a couple that have penalties, and several that simply have effects. Whether they’re good or bad depends entirely on what you were looking for! They are not, however, optional. If you land in the Pantry and you have two Coins, you must trade them for two Diamonds.

The “honeypot” of the arrangement is the King’s Bedchambers, which give you three Diamonds for landing there. If you gained the Balcony by knocking the King off it (not visible in my pictures, as the King has already been displaced and given his consolation prize of a lower Roof; at the beginning of the game, the Balcony balances over the top of his Bedchambers) you get five instead! Knocking the King down from his lower Roof will also gain you the Balcony, later in the game, but now you’re just bullying the poor guy.

If you’re not familiar with the serotonin rush of flinging little game pieces at the board for points, I highly recommend it. Good for the soul. Try not to hit the other players, though!

Scarf-N-Barf is a vomit-humored game from Steve Jackson Games, and both very simple and very quick. It’s exactly what it says on the tin; you’re going to (in card game manner, thankfully) eat lots of junk food, then go on crazy rides and try not to hurl.

For breakfast, lunch, and dinner each – you’ve spent all day doing this, vomit not deterring you – you’ll pick three of the six cards you’ve been dealt, representing the food you eat. Some of these sound really good: Cheese Curds! Some do not, like the Chowder Pop. All foods have a color-number combo associated with them; the more points its worth, the more of these criteria they have. After everyone has picked their meals, three Rides are dealt (with names like “Tilt-A-Hurl” and “Hork-A-Tron”) which all players will suffer together. One Ride at a time, the corresponding color dice will be rolled, and any food items that match both the color of the die and the number rolled are lost; you throw up straight into the discard. Any foods that survive all three Rides are successfully digested. At the end of the day, the player who’s retained the highest point value wins!

This is one of those games that’s about luck in a variety of ways. The cards you’re given. The dice indicated by the Ride cards. The way you actually roll. Doubles on your cards are a pain; doubles on your dice are a gift. There are several ways to strategize and none of them are guaranteed to work. The chaos is palpable. And your actual stomach’s contents are safe, unless the concept (or the cards) makes you queasy.

That’s right! The cat, the myth, the legend: Purrrlock Holmes! Purrrlock Holmes: Furriarty’s Trail is, you’ll surely have deduced, a deductive reasoning game. The goal is to work together to catch Furriarty before he can escape London, while simultaneously competing to be the best Inspector!

It comes down to a lot of smaller cases, like pulling threads. Each player has an Investigation, stood facing away from them so only their opponents can see. This card, like all the rest, features one of five characters, and one of twelve times. The goal is to guess one or both correctly. Not without evidence, of course! Each turn, you’ll Investigate two cards from your hand, revealing them to the other players, who will tell you if each is a Lead or Dead End. A Lead is a card that has the same Suspect, same Hour, or an adjacent Hour to your Investigation. You also draw and Investigate two cards when you draw a new Investigation, so you always have something to work with!

You may guess once per turn; if you’re right, you take tokens from Furriarty’s trail equal to the aspects you deduced and place them on the Investigation, discarding the Leads and Dead Ends. Note that if you guess both, you must get both right; otherwise, you’re incorrect, and your opponents are disallowed to tell you why. If you guess incorrectly, the Investigation stays open, and you draw no cards this turn. Usually, you end your turn by passing your two remaining cards, then drawing two new ones; instead, you’ll have no choice but to Investigate the cards you’re given next turn. This isn’t always the worst thing – I’ve found that if you’re down to two times and you know the suspect, or vice versa, it’s often worth taking the guess and, if necessary, taking next turn’s guess before you Investigate.

The goal, ultimately, is to catch Furriarty, who functions like a token and moves one spot forward each time everyone’s had a turn, revealing the token he passed. Furriarty is worth three points, while the other tokens range from one to three. Once closing an Investigation snags him, the game is over, and whoever has the most points is Scotland Pound Chief Inspector! If Furriarty reaches the end of the trail, though, and one last round isn’t enough to catch up, Furriarty escapes, everyone loses, and the player with the least points is… Litter Box Inspector. *shudder*

The timing is well-balanced, so it tends to be pretty close. You can call on Holmes for help, once per game, to take an extra guess and a one point penalty. Absolutely worth it, to not get stuck on box duty. And to catch that crook!

There’s a kids game with exactly that premise: Penguin! Yep, just Penguin. And it’s easy to learn, as evidenced by the single double-sided sheet of rules.

The even shorter version? Players blindly draw penguins and hide them behind their screen, so only they can see. Everyone takes turns placing a single penguin in play, either next to one that’s already there, or balanced between two, matching the color of at least one of them. Usually the bottom row has a max of eight penguins, but we were playing two-player, so it was seven. A player is out when they can’t play another figure. The round is over when everyone is out.

Now, you’ve heard of highest score, you’ve heard of lowest score, but get ready for: least negative score! That’s right, players score penalties for each penguin they couldn’t place. They also incur a hefty penalty if they knock over the iceberg, but since we were making full use of the wings (slots for the base of penguins above, holding them steady) we didn’t exactly have that problem.

Play until you’ve had as many rounds as you have players, and then award whomever has the least penalties “Monarch of Penguin Stacking”! (That’s not an official part of the game, but you could.)

This one’s really simple, so it may be under-stimulating for an all-adult group, but I imagine it’s good for little ones, and especially for encouraging them to be gentle with piece placement. That, and there is a little strategy in the form of cutting off different color paths, or trying not to.

Arboretum is a gorgeous tree-based strategy game that I tried at a friend’s house this week… and completely forgot to take pictures of. Whoops. The basis of the game is that you’re building an arboretum and, eventually, scoring your trees. Or rather… some of them.

Each player starts with seven cards in hand, which will be a constant. On your turn, you’ll draw two cards, play one, and discard another. Each player has their own face-up discard pile, which is important because cards can be drawn from the top of the deck, but also the top of any discard!

Except for your first card, everything played has to be orthogonally adjacent to a tree already in your arboretum. Everyone has their own, so your played cards don’t directly affect each other, but may affect what cards you choose to pick up. More on that later. The goal, ultimately, is to make paths. A path is any set of trees of ascending value that start and end with the same species. (So long as you can draw a line between them, it can be as twisty as you want.) The trees in the middle can be something else, and they can skip numbers, but you get a bonus point for paths that start with a 1, and two for paths that end with an 8! You also get extra points if your path is at least 4 trees long and all the same species.

Your strategy, then, may be informed by what other players are playing, to block advantageous moves. However. There’s another element to scoring. Only one player has the right to score each species! Who is determined by the cards in your hand when the deck runs out. Whoever has the highest sum value of that species in their hand gets to score it – ties are friendly, and if nobody has it then everyone can score. This means you might pick up other players’ favored trees, to prevent them from scoring, but you also need enough of your best types in hand to actually reap the benefits of your work.

Between the spatial logic, planning ahead, ever-shifting discard selection, and scoring intricacies, Arboretum is a deceptively challenging mental exercise hidden behind calming, beautiful art.