Duck & Cover

• Designer: Oussama Khelifati
• Publisher: Captain Games
• Players: 2-7
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Duck & Cover is a 20 minutes goofy game in which you’re trying to have the less water around your bathtub. You will either duck your ducks by moving them around your grid or cover your duck cards with other ducks. You have 3 rounds to get the lowest score and to not have water everywhere. Your ducks will love that for sure!

Each player takes one of the Duck Families (cards numbered 1-12 in their color), shuffles them, and then lays out the cards in a 4×3 grid.  The Draw deck is shuffled and placed near the Captain player.

In each round, the Captain draws the top card of the Draw deck and announces the number out loud.  All players now must simultaneously look for the matching numbered card in their own grid and then either Duck or Cover.  If they choose to Duck, they move that card to any empty space directly adjacent to at least one other card in their grid.  If they choose to over, the card is moved orthogonally one space and placed on top of the card in that direction. If the associated card is on the top of a stack, you move the entire stack when you Cover.   

There are two special cards in the Draw Deck.  The Max card means that all players must Duck or Cover their highest valued visible card.  The Repeat card means that each player must Duck or Cover the card most recently announced again.

If you cannot find the numbered card (because you have previously covered it), you must say Quack.  

If all players have Quacked, the Draw Card is placed in the discard pile.  It is possible for the Max or the Repeat card to end up in the Discard pile.  Otherwise, it is placed as the top card of the Captain pile (and becomes the only card visible in the Captain pile).  If the draw pile is ever exhausted, shuffle the Captain pile into a new deck.

Continue playing until either one player has all their cards in a single stack OR you hit the designated number of cards in the discard area (9/8/7/6/5/4 cards for 2/3/4/5/6/7 players).  Each player scores points equal to the splashes seen on all their visible cards – in the bottom right corner of the cards.  The player with the lowest score after three rounds is the winner.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the fewest visible cards at the end of the third and final round.

My thoughts on the game

Duck & Cover feels like a variant of the public domain game Golf where you try to exchange/move cards around your array to get the lowest score.  Here, all players have a randomly different setup and then have to react to the numbers as they are drawn from the Draw Deck.   There is no skill or strategy in this part of the game, as you shuffle your numbers and deal them out randomly, and you get no choice in what number comes up – just see the Draw Deck card and then do it.

When you know what number is up next, you have the two options of Ducking (moving) or Covering (placing its stack on top of another adjacent stack).  Early on, I feel pretty good about covering whenever possible – though I might not cover the smallest numbers as they have a scoring value of 0 or 1.  Everything else can get covered for me. Double bonus if I can take an exterior stack and cover something interior – because as long as I don’t create a hole in my array, it’s more likely that I can cover that stack up with something else on a later play.

Nearing the end of the game, there is a bit more skill needed to figure out when it is best to Duck or Cover – mostly trying to decide whether you want to move a stack (in anticipation of getting it covered later), though this has some short term risk because you’ll have a higher point total showing when you do this as opposed to covering up a stack.  It’s just a bit of risk/reward here, but nothing you’ll end up in Analysis Paralysis about.

You’ll have to keep an eye out on the number of cards in the discard pile as well as the state of the other player boards to try to figure out how much time you have left in a round.  Memory will also help as the distribution of the deck is known from the start.

Each hand only takes a few minutes and the whole game can be played in about 15.  Theoretically an infinite number of people can play, and with the expansion they handed me at the stand in Essen, I have 9 player decks here.  (You could always just use a regular deck of cards to give you more player sets).  It’s light fun, and the sort of thing that the family will play at the holidays.  It’s honestly a bit light for the game group (though we enjoyed it when we played it in that setting).  I’ll keep Path of Civilization for them, and put this with the family gathering oriented releases such as Sides and 13 Words.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor