That’s Pretty Clever! Kids
- Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
- Publisher: Schmidt / CMYK
- Players: 2-4
- Age: 5+
- Time: 15 minutes
- Amazon Affiliate Link: https://amzn.to/3Y0In7n
- Played with review copy provided by CMYK
You want to get your hands on everything you can at the birthday party: balloons, gifts, candles, and mountains of sweets! Will you be able to grab more than all the other partygoers?
This game is similar to Ganz schön clever, with one player rolling dice on their turn, then choosing what they want while everyone else gets something from what’s left behind.
On your turn, roll the five dice. The faces of these dice show a joker symbol or an icon on one of four colored backgrounds. Choose all the dice of one background color, taking any jokers at the same time, then use the symbols on these die faces to mark off items in this colored area of your score sheet:
- Balloons are in the yellow area, for example, and you must mark them off left to right: red, blue, green, lilac, blue, etc.
- For the train of candles in the orange area, you must have as many candles as are on the next train car in order to mark it out.
- Gifts in the green area can be marked off in any order.
- Sweets in the blue area are depicted in pairs in rows — doughnuts, cake, cupcakes — and you mark spaces in a row left to right as long as you have a pair of matching sweets on the dice.
If you can’t use a die that you took, e.g., you took red, blue and lilac balloons and could mark off only the first two, then you must return the unused dice to any others left behind. Each other player then chooses dice of a single background color — and players can choose the same or different colors — and marks off what they can.
If you mark off a circled item or a row of gifts next to a circle, you can immediately cross off an item in the section of the same color as that circle. Crossing off this item might give you another bonus!
When a player marks off all items in one area, the game ends at the conclusion of that turn. Various items or rows that you complete have rainbow stars connected to them, and whoever collects the most rainbow stars wins!
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My thoughts on the game
Well, it’s not often that I review games for the 5+ age group, but this one is the rare exception… I will say that I think that the mechanics are certainly easy enough for a kindergartner to perform, but I do wonder whether or not the average 5yo can process some of the chaining decisions that happen in the game. But, hey, it’s been awhile since I’ve had a kid that age, and maybe as a parent, you’re just going to be thrilled to have a game to play with your youngster that you also find interesting yourself?! And… maybe you can use this game as a way to teach those advanced reasoning skills?
This version of the game tries to keep some of the action chaining that have made so many gamers love the original – but obviously done in a much simpler method. The only sort of chain here is an extra action, and they are all easily seen with huge circles around the areas that grant the extra action. Points are also much easier to track – the multicolored stars are easy to see.
As most of the plays require you to have an exact match of background/icon, it is easy to figure out what your options are. (Yeah, I know there is a joker face – but most kids have been able to figure this out without too much hassle). This does maybe make it a bit more likely that you can’t do anything, but the rules allow the active player to re-roll until they are able to use at least one of the dice.
The game never lasts too long, and it is easy to remember when the game ends – when anyone finishes off any one single area. This has been a great introductory version of the game for kids and non-gamers, and I plan to use it as a spring board to the real Clever dice games…
Amazon Affiliate Link: https://amzn.to/3Y0In7n
Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor
