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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: Mr. McGreggor got nothing on us as we chase out rabbits and groundhogs to protect our harvest in Veggie Garden
Next: We climb the 3 dimensional game board to spread a rainbow of powders far and wide in Holi: Festival of Colors
Lastly: We test Mike’s dice rolling luck again as form words with d6s in Spill & Spell
Veggie Garden
Designed by: Kelly North Adams
Published by: Quick Simple Fun Games (2017)
Players: 2 – 4
Ages: 12 & up
Playing time: 20 – 30 minutes
Veggie Garden is a set collection game, where players are farmers trying to grow the most valuable vegetables in particular patches of the garden.
Play revolves around a 4×4 grid, which is the community veggie garden. Everyone will draw their points off this grid. The fence posts have values, which will switch all around during the course of gameplay.
The vegetable cards you have in your hand will dictate your score. Everyone starts the game with 2 cards, and players will go around in turn until everyone winds up with 8 cards.
Veggie cards can be played to activate powers associated with that vegetable. For example, play a cabbage card to shift an entire row of veggies. Or play a pepper card, to swap adjacent fence post values.
Score your hand at the end of the game, most points wins. Now eat your veggies!
Holi: Festival of Colors
Designed by: Julio E. Nazario
Published by: Floodgate Games (2020)
Players: 2 – 4
Ages: 13 & up
Playing time: 20 – 40 min
HOLI: Festival of Colors is an area control game where players gather to celebrate the end of winter as they spread colorful powder on each other, dancing and celebrating new beginnings. Well, not so much dancing in this game, but throwing your color around – absolutely!
Each player chooses a color, takes that color meeple, and receives a deck of cards specific to that color. A player will play a card from their hand and spread their color on the game board in the pattern dictated by that card. Simple enough.
The entire pattern has to be completed. If you can’t perform the whole pattern, you can’t use that card.
Try to get your color on the other player’s meeple. That scores you points.
There are also sweets tokens on the board – collect the most of those to achieve more points.
Also score bonus points by achieving one of the two special conditions cards (drawn randomly from a pile of special game condition cards)
Move your meeple around to achieve your desired pattern. And also don’t forget to move up. Yes, there are three levels to the game board. The higher you go to throw colors, the more points they are worth at the end of the game. Most points wins, and becomes HOLIer than thou.
Spill & Spell
Published by: Parker Brothers (1956)
Players: 1 – 10
Ages: “For all ages”
Spill and Spell is a dice rolling game where – instead of numbers – the faces of the dice are letters. Roll the dice and spell out words.
Try to use all the dice in a crossword puzzle style, and any unusable letters are negative points
Minimum of 3 letters per word. Score the square of the number of letters in the word (3 letter word = 9 points, 4 letter word = 16 points)
The first player to reach 500 points is the winner. But frankly, by then, I think everyone ends the game a winner.