Chris
Netherlands
's-Hertogenbosch
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I’m going to do a series of reviews of three of my favorite dice games in the same series. I will try and make a comparison between the three games, so people can make a choice if they want one of these games, but they don’t know which one is best suited for them.
The three games are Pickomino, Sushizock im Gockelwok and Hoppladi Hopplada.
Review of Pickomino
Review of Hoppladi, Hopplada!
After the success of Pickomino with all the people I play games with, I had to try it’s follow-up: Sushizock im Gockelwok, also by Reiner Knizia. In this game your goal is to score tiles by rolling dice, just like pickomino! Again, there are push your luck and take that elements. But hey, there must be differences, right? There are. This game adds some memory aspects and more meaningful tactics.
Now, you only have 5 dice. Each showing 2 blue sushi, 2 red fishbones, 1 blue chopsticks and 1 red chopsticks. 12 blue sushi tiles - with positive victory points of different values (ranging +1 through +6) - and 12 red fishbones tiles - with negative victory points of different values (ranging -1 through -4) - are all lined up.
When you roll the dice and you roll four sushi, you can take the fourth sushi tile. When you roll 2 fishbones, you can take the second fishbones tile.
In this game the scored tiles are also stacked and the top one can be stolen, just like pickomino. To pull this off, you have to roll three chopsticks of the same colour. With blue chopsticks you can steal a blue tile and with the red ones you can steal red tiles.
A major difference with pickomino is that you can steal all the other tiles as well. Therefore you have to roll at least four chopsticks of the same colour. You have to memorize the tiles you want to steal, though. You’re not allowed to browse through other players stacks, you just have to name the one you want.
In a turn you roll the five dice. You have to put at least one dice aside and may re-roll the others. You may roll three times.
But, when the red fishbones tiles score negative victory points, why does anybody want to have these, let alone steal them?! The fun part in this game comes in scoring the tiles. You have to have red tiles to score the blue tiles. If you have more blue tiles than red tiles, the top blue tiles will not be scoresd; you can’t pick the ones you want to score! If you have more red tiles than blue tiles, that’s just bad luck, they will all be scored.
This game offers more meaningful decisions than pickomino. You can steal from the player of your choice. And you can choose what to steal, will you take that valuable blue tile for yourself, or will you take that blue tile that’s not that valuable in itself, but leaves the other player with many negative victory points. Or you can steal the relatively valuable red tiles with the least negative victory points. Perhaps you can let a player have lots of valuable blue tiles but no red tiles, making his blue tiles worthless.
This game is best with three. You want to have a choice when you’re stealing, therefore you have to be playing with at least two opponents, but you also want to be able to memorize the tiles, which is easier with fewer players. With more players people will have less tiles, making the novelty in scoring less relevant, as well. This is my filler of choice when playing with a smaller group!
 
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Guy Riessen
United States
petaluma
California
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This is an addicting, very fast playing, filler game!
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Posted Mon Oct 12, 2009 8:57 pm
