Jason Root
Australia
Dubbo
NSW
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You are reading an addition to Thiessi’s Thoughts, a series of reviews in which I give a quick overview of a particular game and then share some of my personal impressions. My reviews are not intended to be a comprehensive resource. Rather, I simply hope that you find these thoughts useful when you consider which of the many board games out there you will purchase in exchange for your hard earned cash.
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Hisss is a colourful snake-making tile game for 2-5 players from the legend of the children’s’ game field, Gamewright. Gamewright have helpfully indicated that they recommend Hisss for children aged 4 and up. Well, I tend to ignore these kinds of recommendations and dive in head first with my kids.
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Overview of Gameplay
Hisss contains 50 snake cards (which are actually thick enough to be called tiles). There are 6 heads, 6 tails, 36 mid-sections and 2 wild cards. Each head is a different colour, each tail is a different colour and each mid-section is a different colour at each end.
The object of the game is to the collect the most cards by building complete snakes.. In order to build a complete snake, the player must match up a head, at least one mid-section and one tail, and ensure that all of the colours match up.
That's a lot of snakes! Image by jwedel
To set up the game, all of the cards are placed face down and fanned for ease of selection. The starting player draws any one of the fanned cards and places it face up as a starter card. Each player in turn, beginning with the starting player, draws one face down card. If any of the card’s colours match a face up card, then the drawn card must be placed in order to match with a face up card. If the card can’t be attached to a face up card, the a new snake-under construction is formed. Two snakes under construction may be combined into a single snake if the colours match up. Wild cards may obviously be attached to any colour.
If a player completes a snake they say ‘HISSS’ and claim the snake. This completed snake is placed in the player’s snake pit and will score a point for each card in the snake at the end of the game.
A completed snake. Image by mistermarino.
Play continues until all of the cards have been drawn and placed. Players count the number of cards that make up their claimed and complete snakes. The winner is the player with the most cards that make up claimed and complete snakes.
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My Thoughts
I am always looking out for games to play with my kids because, like any parent, I love spending time with them and they love spending time with me. It makes sense that we should spend time together doing something that I enjoy, namely, playing games.
I picked up Hisss from Mindgames in Canberra on a trip away because I knew that my son, who was two at the time, absolutely loved snakes. He loved drawing snakes, he loved talking about snakes, he loved looking at snake pictures and videos of snakes eating things on the internet.
A snake eating something.
I tried to introduce the two year old version of my son to Hisss and he was simply not interested in even attempting to play by the rules. He was content at that point to make giant snakes out of the tiles with no regard to spatial orientation or even colour recognition. He would just slap those cards down randomly and insist that before him was a perfectly ordinary looking snake, when in fact the often joked about fishmen of Games Workshop fame or even the Duke of Wellington crawling on the floor would have made a more convincing snake than my son’s attempt.
The Duke of Wellington, when crawling, makes a more convincing snake than my two year old son when playing Hisss
I then tried introducing Hisss to my then three year old daughter. She was happy to make some snakes for a total of five minutes and then went back to force feeding her dolls play dough and orange juice.
So, Hisss seemed to be a dismal failure.
What of this talk of teaching colour recognition? What about visual logic? What about counting skills? All these skills that Gamewright insisted this game taught were nowhere to be seen.
Until now.
I recently brought out Hisss again with my now three year old son and four year old daughter and it has been a great success! My daughter plays by the correct rules with minimal prompting and my son will now sit down for a full game with a small dose of help.
So while people may think that there is not much of a game in Hisss (and in a way, they are right!), it does provide a stepping stone to introduce children to the wonderful world of board games.
There is nothing groundbreaking to be seen here, but Hisss does an adequate job of introducing children to concepts like turn taking, patience, and the obvious colour recognition and spatial skills.
Perhaps those age recommendations on the box are there for a legitimate reason? Maybe your child is not the incredibly above average super human that you so desperately want them to be?
And maybe, just maybe, Hisss is the perfect game to use as a tool to introduce your child to our great hobby.
If they are into snakes.
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Mattwran
United States
East Longmeadow
Massachusetts
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Some friends got this for our 3-year old for Christmas and she just loves it. We had a dinner party a couple nights ago and she immediately ran to get her copy of Hiss and proceeded to try to cajole any adult who would listen into a game.
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Posted Mon Jan 10, 2011 9:36 am
