Dale Yu: Essen Preview of Crazy Eggz and Touch Down

Crazy Eggz

• Designer: Roberto Fraga
• Publisher: Happy Baobab
• Players: 2-4
• Ages: 7+
• Time: 15 mins

Crazy Eggz is a reprint of a fairly unique game, Eiertanz.  This game comes in a real egg carton – making it one of the most unique boxes in my game room.  Inside the egg crate, you’ll find, 9 orange rubber eggs (air filled), 1 solid blue rubber egg, a yellow plastic egg cup and two dice.

Each player starts the game by rolling the white body die. This die tells him where he has to keep the egg – maybe inside the elbow, maybe between the knees, maybe in your armpit.  The egg must stay there for the rest of the game and you must continue to play while holding the eggs in their assigned positions.  One egg is placed on the egg cup, and the rest start in the crate.

On a turn, the player rolls the red die – based on the face shown – the players then vie to collect an orange egg.  It might ask you to be the first person to pick up the egg which is on the egg stand.  You might have to be the first person to pick up the red die.  You may have to be the first to make a John-Travolta-in-Saturday-Night-Fever pose.  Whichever player first makes the right move (if the face is red) gets an orange egg. If the face is blue – then you just don’t want to be the last to do the right thing…  because the last person has to return one of their previously collected eggs to the crate.  But.. there’s still more fun to come. If someone won an egg this turn, that person then rolls the white die to tell him where he has to keep the egg.

The game can end if a player gets 5 eggs. If so, he must twirl around and yell cock-a-doodle-doo.  If he doesn’t lose any of his eggs, he wins.  The game can also end if all the eggs are taken.  All players do the same spin and cock-a-doodle-doo thing, and the player who has the most eggs still on their body after the spin win the game.

This is obviously a whimsical and child oriented game, but it never fails to garner laughs when it hits the table -even when all the players are adults.  It’s nice to see that the game is getting a second life with this reprint.

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Touch Down

• Designer: Alexsandr Starovojtov
• Publisher: Happy Baobab
• Players: 2 or 4
• Time: 20 minutes

Touch Down is a previously abstract 2p game (Like Chess but Less!) which now carries an American football theme melded with farm animals.  In this game, you start with your animals in a 2×2 grid in one of the corners of the board. Your opponent starts with his animals in a similar arrangement in the opposite corner. Random tiles are drawn to make up the rest of the board which is now a 3×3 array of cards on the table.

The goal (like Chinese Checkers) is to move all of your pieces into the starting area of your opponent on the opposite side of the board.  On a turn – you have 3 action points to use.

For 1 AP:

You can move a token one space orthogonally

You can jump over on token orthogonally into an empty space

For 2 AP:

You can leap over a fence orthogonally into an empty space (cannot leap over a fence and a token at the same time)

For 3 AP:

You can leap over a double fence

On each turn, you MUST use all 3 AP, even if this means that you end up moving some of your pieces backwards on your turn.

The game continues until one player has all of their pieces on their opponents starting four spaces.  If this is the second player, that player wins immediately.  If this was the starting player, that player states how many AP were used to get to the final state (this is an exception to using all the AP every turn).  The second player now has to do the same in that number of AP.  If he can, he wins.  If not, the first player wins.

There is also a team version of the game where two players are on each team (on a larger board) and the team which can get all 8 of their animals onto their opponents starting spaces will win.

The game is a decent abstract game, and while it has a theme loosely attached to it, this is a thinky, fairly dry game.  It is a good introduction to action point games as there aren’t many different choices of actions, so it is easy to remember what all your options are.

The games play quickly, and the rules actually suggest playing best 2 out of 3 for a full game experience.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor