In 2018, a fairly unknown designer named Wolfgang Warsch ended up with three of the six nominations for the annual board game awards known as the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) and the Kennerspiel des Jahres (often translated as the ‘expert’ game of the year, or the connoisseur’s game of the year), winning the Kennerspiel for his fun press-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg. One of those other nominations was for the game known as That’s Pretty Clever! (Ganz Schön Clever), a roll-and-write game with a crazy scoresheet that lends itself to all kinds of real-time decision-making.
That’s Pretty Clever! gives you six dice, each a different color, that you’ll roll three times on every turn. You also have a scoresheet with five scoring areas, one for each die color except the white die, which is always wild. You roll all six dice and choose one to score, but then must set aside all dice with values lower than the one you chose, placing them (if you’d like) on the ‘silver platter’ in the game box. You roll all remaining dice, choose another one to score, set aside those with lower values, and then roll any dice still remaining and score one more. You’ll do this sequence four to six times, depending on the player count. When an opponent rolls, you’ll still get to choose one die to score. After that opponent has finished all three of their rolls, you can choose any die from the silver platter and score it. Multiple players can choose to score the same die in this stage. You can still score more dice than this, however, if you choose wisely when scoring dice you automatically get to score.
The scoresheet has five sections and each scores completely differently. The yellow area has a 4×4 grid with four spaces already X’d out, and then two spaces each showing a number from 1 to 6. If you score the yellow die, you cross out a space with the number showing on the die. (You can always use the white die for the same purpose, since it’s wild, but I won’t repeat that in each section.) When you complete a row or the top left to lower right diagonal, you get a bonus: you can fill in another square in a different (specified) section, or you get a +1 bonus that allows you to choose to score an extra die at the end of someone’s turn – even your own, or you get a fox bonus, which I’ll explain in a moment. When you complete a column, you score 10 to 20 points at game-end.
The blue section also has a grid, but this one goes from 2 to 12, and you score it by combining the blue die’s value with the white die’s. Thus not every space is equally easy to cross out, and when you get a blue bonus in another section, you might want to mark the 2 or the 12 since they’re generally hard to get. You score points at game-end based on the number of spaces marked in the blue section, with the values increasing faster as the number of spaces increases.
The green, orange, and purple sections are all rows that you’ll fill out left to right. The green row requires dice values greater than or equal to what’s shown in the space, starting at 1, going up to 5, then restarting at 1. The orange row is the easiest to fill in – you just write the die’s value in a space, with no restrictions. Some spaces let you double the die’s value; the last space lets you triple it. The purple row is the trickiest, as you can only fill in a space with a number greater than the one in the space before it, unless the prior number is a 6, in which case you can start over. All three of these rows award bonuses for certain spaces, but the purple row gives you a bonus of some sort on every space starting with the third one, so I think it’s the most valuable section on the sheet. At game-end, you score the orange and purple by adding all the numbers you’ve written in the squares, and you score the green by looking at the number above the last square you’ve filled, with values increasing kind of like they do in the blue section.
There are also a few bonuses you get at the start of each round – a free re-roll of all dice, a +1 bonus, and at the start of the fourth round the choice to fill in one square anywhere on your sheet, either with an X (for yellow, blue, and green) or a value of 6 (for orange and purple). At game end, you add up all five of your section scores, and then you count how many fox bonuses you got, with a maximum of five. Find your lowest section score, and then multiply that by your number of foxes, and add that to the five section scores for your total. Over 200 is pretty good; I’ve cracked 300 once in pen-and-paper, while my high score in the app – which works well but assumes you know the game already – is around 285.
I’ve played this dozens of times between pen-and-paper and the app, and I find it incredibly addictive. Despite the simple mechanics, it doesn’t become repetitive because you are always making multifaceted decisions – choosing a die to score usually means relinquishing other dice for the remainder of that turn; choosing when to use those powerful +1 bonuses involves weighing the value of saving them for later, when maybe you can start a daisy-chain of bonuses that will let you fill in four or five boxes with one die. There’s a sequel game I haven’t tried called Twice as Clever! that’s apparently good but not quite as elegant as this original, which has already entered the rotation of games we bring on trips because it’s so simple, portable, and easy to teach.
You can also see my reviews of Warsch’s other games, The Mind, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and The Taverns of Tiefenthal, over at Paste.