{"id":8213,"date":"2020-01-30T10:18:58","date_gmt":"2020-01-30T15:18:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8213"},"modified":"2020-01-30T10:19:46","modified_gmt":"2020-01-30T15:19:46","slug":"thats-pretty-clever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/30\/thats-pretty-clever\/","title":{"rendered":"That’s Pretty Clever!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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!<\/a> (Ganz Sch\u00f6n Clever), a roll-and-write game with a crazy scoresheet that lends itself to all kinds of real-time decision-making. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s Pretty Clever! gives you six dice, each a different\ncolor, that you’ll roll three times on every turn. You also have a scoresheet with\nfive scoring areas, one for each die color except the white die, which is\nalways wild. You roll all six dice and choose one to score, but then must set\naside all dice with values lower<\/em> than the one you chose, placing them\n(if you’d like) on the ‘silver platter’ in the game box. You roll all remaining\ndice, choose another one to score, set aside those with lower values, and then\nroll any dice still remaining and score one more. You’ll do this sequence four\nto six times, depending on the player count. When an opponent rolls, you’ll\nstill get to choose one die to score. After that opponent has finished all\nthree of their rolls, you can choose any die from the silver platter and score\nit. Multiple players can choose to score the same die in this stage. You can\nstill score more dice than this, however, if you choose wisely when scoring dice\nyou automatically get to score.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
A solo game after four rounds.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The scoresheet has five sections and each scores completely\ndifferently. The yellow area has a 4×4 grid with four spaces already X’d out,\nand then two spaces each showing a number from 1 to 6. If you score the yellow\ndie, you cross out a space with the number showing on the die. (You can always\nuse the white die for the same purpose, since it’s wild, but I won’t repeat\nthat in each section.) When you complete a row or the top left to lower right\ndiagonal, you get a bonus: you can fill in another square in a different\n(specified) section, or you get a +1 bonus that allows you to choose to score\nan extra die at the end of someone’s turn \u2013 even your own, or you get a fox\nbonus, which I’ll explain in a moment. When you complete a column, you score 10\nto 20 points at game-end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blue section also has a grid, but this one goes from 2\nto 12, and you score it by combining the blue die’s value with the white die’s.\nThus not every space is equally easy to cross out, and when you get a blue\nbonus in another section, you might want to mark the 2 or the 12 since they’re\ngenerally hard to get. You score points at game-end based on the number of\nspaces marked in the blue section, with the values increasing faster as the\nnumber of spaces increases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The green, orange, and purple sections are all rows that\nyou’ll fill out left to right. The green row requires dice values greater than\nor equal to what’s shown in the space, starting at 1, going up to 5, then restarting\nat 1. The orange row is the easiest to fill in \u2013 you just write the die’s value\nin a space, with no restrictions. Some spaces let you double the die’s value;\nthe last space lets you triple it. The purple row is the trickiest, as you can\nonly fill in a space with a number greater than the one in the space before it,\nunless the prior number is a 6, in which case you can start over. All three of\nthese rows award bonuses for certain spaces, but the purple row gives you a\nbonus of some sort on every space starting with the third one, so I think it’s\nthe most valuable section on the sheet. At game-end, you score the orange and\npurple by adding all the numbers you’ve written in the squares, and you score\nthe green by looking at the number above the last square you’ve filled, with\nvalues increasing kind of like they do in the blue section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>There are also a few bonuses you get at the start of each round \u2013 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 \u2013 which works well but assumes you know the game already \u2013 is around 285.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can also see my reviews of Warsch’s other games, The Mind<\/a>, The Quacks of Quedlinburg<\/a>, and The Taverns of Tiefenthal<\/a>, over at Paste.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,761,455,696,161,951],"class_list":["post-8213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boardgames","tag-dice-games","tag-family-games","tag-games-2","tag-highly-recommended","tag-solitaire-games","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8213"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8216,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8213\/revisions\/8216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}