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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: We do what soccer does best, balance emotional states, in the Ted Lasso Party Game
Next: We balance our habitats one pair of animals at a time in Cascadia
And lastly: We have a balance of shapes, grids, and nostalgia in the game Sly

Ted Lasso Party Game

Designed by: Prospero Hall
Published by: Funko Games (2022)
Players: 2 – 6
Ages: 10 & up
Playing time: 20 minutes

Ted Lasso Party Game is a cooperative game where everyone is trying to lend assistance to the players and coaches of a soccer team, chasing away their troubles, and earning enough happy points to achieve team victory through biscuits and positive reinforcement!

Each person gets dealt a hand of six color-coded cards. In the community area are five characters, each requiring a set of specific cards that must be played on them to clear the characters from the board. Only two of the five characters are ACTIVE at any time. Cards can only be placed on the two active characters, the other three are locked out.

Once the two minute countdown starts, each player on their turn must play all of the cards of the same color in their hand. Cards can be played on active characters, or on the coaching change space, where one of the active characters can be changed. There is also a spot called “Self Care”, where cards can be dumped.

Four rounds of play, and the number of players determined the score needed to win the game.  You just gotta Believe!

Cascadia

Designed by: Randy Flynn
Published by: Flatout Games / Alderac Entertainment Group (2021)
Players: 1 – 4
Ages: 10 & up
Playing time: 30 – 45 minutes

Cascadia is a puzzly tile-laying and token-drafting game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.

In the game, you take turns building out your own terrain area and populating it with wildlife. You start with three hexagonal habitat tiles (with the five types of habitat in the game), and on a turn you choose a new habitat tile that’s paired with a wildlife token, then place that tile next to your other ones and place the wildlife token on an appropriate habitat. (Each tile depicts 1-3 types of wildlife from the five types in the game, and you can place at most one tile on a habitat.) Four tiles are on display, with each tile being paired at random with a wildlife token, so you must make the best of what’s available — unless you have a nature token to spend so that you can pick your choice of each item.

Ideally you can place habitat tiles to create matching terrain that reduces fragmentation and creates wildlife corridors, mostly because you score for the largest area of each type of habitat at game’s end, with a bonus if your group is larger than each other player’s. At the same time, you want to place wildlife tokens so that you can maximize the number of points scored by them, with the wildlife goals being determined at random by one of the four scoring cards for each type of wildlife. Maybe hawks want to be separate from other hawks, while foxes want lots of different animals surrounding them and bears want to be in pairs. Can you make it happen?

Sly

Designed by: Sid Sackson
Published by: Amway (1975)
Players: 1 – 4
Ages: 8 & up
Playing time: 20 min

Sly isn’t a single game but six different ones, sharing board and pieces. The board is 12×12, divided in 16 fields of 3×3, with field centers specially marked. The pieces come in four colors and each set consists of a cylinder, four triangles and six squares.

All games but Line up use the whole 12×12 grid as a playing area. Line Up only uses the center positions of the 16 – 3×3 fields to effectively yield a 4×4 grid of playing positions.

Solitaire Sly is for 1 player and is a variation on the old puzzle of removing pieces by selected jumps. The game starts in a 6×6 grid of pieces, but pieces can jump outside the 6×6 area using the whole 12×12 board if desired.

Sniggle is a racing game for 2-4 players.

Line Up is an alignment two-player game played on a 4×4 grid with each player having two squares, two triangles and one cylinder of his color.

Empire is an abstract two-four player wargame of sorts.

Blockade (two players) is a distant relative of Hnefatafl; each player tries to have his king escape whilst blocking the other’s with his guards.

Gateway, finally, is a 2-4 player game where each tries to enter all his pieces by forming alignments with opposing pieces.

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