Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS | More
Welcome to Which Game First where we boldly explore the hilariously huge world of board games. Did we unearth any hidden treasures you’ve been missing out on? Let’s find out!
First: We wonder if we can get away with putting vanilla frosting on a hot dog in Crazy Cake!
Next: We wonder if we’re clever enough to escape a dangerous labyrinth b4 being trapped forever in The Night Cage!
Lastly: We wonder if it’s better to jump up a level or knock someone back a level in Bailiwick!
Crazy Cake
Designed by: Reed Nickell
Published by: Be Game Social (2021)
Players: 2 – 6
Ages: 6 & up
Crazy Cake is a card game in which the players are bakers looking to complete their 3-tier cake using the highest value ingredients possible while also sabotaging their fellow bakers’ cakes.
Bakers start with 3 cards in their hand. On their turn, the baker will draw one and play one. They can either play an ingredient, a “Sabotage” action card, or discard an unwanted card.
Use Cake, Filling & Frosting cards to complete your cake one ingredient at a time, while using Sabotage cards to trip up other bakers. Play good ingredients on your cake and bad ingredients on their cakes, but be on the lookout for matching sets, which give extra points.
The first one to finish their 3-tier cake ends the game, but the baker with the most points wins, and like the box says … sabotage never tasted so sweet.
The Night Cage
Designed by: Christopher Ryan Chan, Chris McMahon, Rosswell Saunders
Published by: Smirk & Laughter Games (2021)
Players: 1 – 5
Ages: 14 & up
Playing time: 50 min
The Night Cage is a co-operative tile laying game where you and your fellow prisoners must crawl around a dark dungeon to find your escape.
Equipped with nothing but dim candles, players must work together to explore the maze and escape. Unfortunately, the weak candlelight only illuminates your immediate surroundings. Due to the limited light of their candles, players can only see the tiles immediately adjacent to them.
As players move, the tiles they leave behind disappear into the darkness. In this way, the maze is continually made and unmade by the players.
Worse still, something else is moving in the dark maze, and it is not friendly. Beware the monsters that can snuff out your candles, as well as your life.
To win, players must rely on teamwork and collective strategy to collect 4 keys, find an exit gate, and escape the labyrinth together.
Bailiwick
Designed by: Kimberly Coker
Published by: Bailiwick Enterprises (1994)
Players: 2 – 4
Ages: 10 & up
Bailiwick is a ludo-style game, where players zigzag their tokens forward and backward around the rings of the game board, while racing to the center. The kaleidoscopic game board is a tricky maze where you must be on guard, because with the roll of the dice and the movement of a token, the whole can quickly shift!
The challenge of Bailiwick’ is to wind your way through the four rings, moving your triangular tokens either forward (counter-clockwise) on the colored spaces, or backward (clockwise) on the white ones, and maneuvering them onto the stepping stones, to advance upward, as you try to be the first player to get all four tokens into your matching center “bailiwick space.”