Cosmic Cows

Cosmic Cows - you gotta love them cows. Tiny little, doll-like, plastic cows. All ten of them.

And then there's the game. You know Yahtzee? OK. Think of it as Yahtzee with cows. And you're playing a Yahtzee kind of tug-of-war with your opponent, trying to get maybe all 5 dice the same so you can super beam the middle cow, as it were, all the way to your winning zone. Kinda like getting a Yahtzee in, uh, Yahtzee. Or maybe a full-house so you can move one cow three spaces closer to you and the other, two. Before, of course, your opponent, no doubt, pulls them back. Ten different cows to shoot for. Five different dice. The number of spaces a cow gets to move depends on how many dice show that number. Oh, and you get three rolls, like as in, well, Yahtzee.

But it's not Yahtzee. It's Cosmic Cows, and darn if those little cows and that dicey equivalent of tug-of-warring them back and forth across the board doesn't make it feel like something really different than Yahtzee. Not like a dice game at all. But a board game. And a sweet, light, semi-strategic board game it is. One that has very cute little plastic cows and is really easy to learn how to play - especially if you know how to play games like Yahtzee.

Knights of Charlemagne

Knights of Charlemagne, yet another game by the amazingly prolific Reiner Knizia, is what one might call a Major FUN Award-winning strategic card game. One might call it that, because:

1) it feels very much like a strategy game, played between 2-4 players, where people hope to outbid each other for high-scoring resources.

B) it is played with cards - one deck of well-made, easily shuffled playing cards, and another deck of pleasingly thick, cardboard resource cards.

And III) it received a Major FUN Thinking Games award.

There are 50 "Knights" playing cards - five suits (colors), each suit consisting of two sets of cards numbered from 1 to 5. Then there are 21 of those pleasingly thick resource tiles. Five of them are called "Manors," five "Cities," 10 more "Treasures," and one "bonus" tile. The tiles are arranged in columns. Some tiles are worth more than others. To win a tile, you have to have invested more cards than your opponent's.

There are complications, o, there are complications. There are five different colors of Knight cards, don't you know, and the City Tiles are won by the player who has bid more knights of the same color, whereas the Manor cards the player who has invested more knights of the same rank. And yet more complications relating to the bonus card. Not complex complications, mind you, but complications of the intrigue-generating kind.

The game doesn't take long to teach (especially if the teacher has already played it), and less than a half hour to play - a very focused, strategically dense, and yet refreshingly light-hearted half hour.

Quelf

Quelf is a silly game. For those of us who are mature enough to appreciate silliness as an art form, it is both a bench- and a watermark of wackiness.

If you find yourself unwilling to, for example, "suck your thumb in silence and start rolling the dice. When you roll a '3,' shout, 'Get off my land!' in your best chipmunk voice," mayhap Quelf is not exactly your kind of game.

There are five decks of cards, each a different color. There's a board. Each space on the board is a different color. Hence, each turn you must draw from one of the decks. Each turn. The decks? There's "Showbiz" (e.g. "You are now a professor of archeology with a lisp. Give us a dissertation on archaeological discoveries in your backyard during the last 10 years."), and Quizzle, (for another example, "How many fingers does a one-armed and thumbless woman have?), Scatterbrainz (everybody takes turns, trying, without repeating, to add to a list of answers for such questions as "Ways to get your leg out of a spring-loaded, steel bear trap."), Stuntz (see "suck your thumb," above), and the fortuitously Curses-like deck of "Roolz" ("For the remainder of the game, every sentence that you speak must end with the words 'Hear me, for I have spoken.' If you forget, pay the penalty.").

Then, on every card, there's also a "Quelf Effect" - additional rules, adding clarity sometimes, creating chaos others.

Quelf is the kind of game you'll want to devote most of the evening to. Not that it's complex or profound, but rather because the consequences of all those different decks become more apparent, and more hilarious as the game unfolds. It may take a while to manifest themselves. It takes a few rounds before you can truly grasp the implications of the various decks and the exacerbating joys of their Quelf Effects, but by that time you'll probably be laughing too much to notice.

Quelf is a masterpiece of silliness. Hence, Major FUN.