Base price: $30.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: ~10 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Dodo was provided by KOSMOS.
I love when I’m behind enough on reviews that I’m writing reviews somewhere impractical. Current location is OrcaCon, watching my friends play Newsboys while I finish this draft up. That’s definitely on me and I made my choices, which were largely staying up until 5AM watching my friend play The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, and I accept that. I’m now mostly just sleepy about it. So I’m in the doghouse on writing for an hour or more while I get this review turned up. These are the sacrifices I make for you and certainly not just the consequences of my own actions. Probably. Either way, let’s dive in and check out Dodo!
In Dodo, a big Dodo on top of the mountain has laid an extremely wobbly egg. At this juncture, Dodos are still pretty rare, so losing a big Dodo egg is not great. As a result, the villagers are springing into action to build a set of bridges to help the egg down the peak so that it can be placed safely and incubated. As it rolls, you need to team up to acquire building materials and construct the bridges. But hurry: egg waits for no man!
Contents
Setup
First, build the mountain and place it in the center of the table.
Next, set out the bridges: put them circles-side up, with 1 on top and 6 on the bottom.
Place the boat near the bottom of the mountain, then shuffle the various tokens and place them all face-down around the Mountain.
Place the wobbly egg in the nest; keep the bird in place so it doesn’t roll yet.
Give one player the die.
You should be ready to start! When you are, tilt the bird so that the egg starts rolling!
Gameplay
This one’s pretty straightforward, though it can be challenging to play well. Hopefully you’re not reading this after you released the egg, because the game is real-time. Players have their own turns, but you need to play fast so the egg doesn’t fall!
On your turn, start by rolling the die, and then flip a token. If the token matches (or if it’s a Villager), place it on an open space on the current Bridge! Otherwise your turn ends.
If you completely fill the empty spaces on a Bridge, it’s built! Quickly add it to the mountain before the Egg falls. If you build the last Bridge, you have to complete the dock and add the Boat!
If the Egg can make its way to the boat, you win! If the egg falls off of the Mountain, you lose!
Player Count Differences
I mean, you’re allowed to communicate with players, so you can just tell them what the tile you looked at was even if it doesn’t match with the die value you rolled. As a result, more players means more collective memory for things that you’ve seen before. Since this is a speed game, rather than a strategy game, having more people around to remember what each token was will help players quickly figure out what to do. It’s an easy enough game that it’s not too big of a deal if you’re only at two players, but you might find more heads are better than one.
Strategy
- Prioritize speed. This is a speed game, so you need to be rolling the dice quickly, flipping tokens quickly, and putting the bridge components on the mountain quickly. Try to take tokens close to you and don’t let the die roll too far away! It’s not that every second will count necessarily, but every second counts.
- Since this has some memory elements to it, try to keep the tokens you’ve already seen grouped? Or at least have one player in charge of remembering where certain things are and another player in charge of other icons or something. Having a useful mnemonic scheme of some kind (or just sharing responsibility) makes it much easier to remember where the bamboo is versus where the axe is, and you’ll need to be quick if you don’t want to lose!
- Communicate actively with your partners. Tell them if you remember something! You’re playing on a team, and you both win or lose together. The more you can help them find something useful, the better off you’ll be.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I was actually pleasantly surprised by the level of difficulty of the game on Expert Mode. It’s still fairly approachable, granted, but we had to hustle to win our game, so we couldn’t just laze around.
- Extremely silly game. I mean, you’re rolling a die to try and stop a wobbly egg from falling off a mountain; the game can only be so serious. But it’s cute and fun, and that goes a long way.
- The Mountain’s construction is quite fun! It’s actually fun to do the initial setup and place the bridges on it, but the thing I like best is that the mountain itself has a little piggy bank slot for you to put the tokens in so that they land inside the cave, out of play. Does it always work? No, gravity is finicky. Is it fun? Absolutely.
- Easy to reset for another game. You just take the bridges off, shuffle the tokens again, and you’re good to go!
- Plays pretty fast, which is nice. I mean, having the egg work as a literal timer helps, for sure, but it’s a pretty speedy game.
- I don’t normally love memory games, but I think the random chance of wild tokens is also nice. It kind of makes you feel a bit better when you would have otherwise missed, and if you don’t like wild tokens, the game is totally okay with you just playing without them for a bit of extra difficulty, Wins all around.
Mehs
- This game is going to be finicky, depending on your table setup. One particular thing is that if the mountain is at an angle, that can affect how well the egg rolls, which isn’t necessarily great. Do your best to play on a flat surface, where possible.
Cons
- Having to dislodge the egg if it gets stuck kills a bit of the game’s momentum. The egg can sometimes slide to the side and stop rolling by getting caught on the mountain itself, so you’ll need to sort of hit the table to get it rolling again. That’s fine, but it would be nice if that didn’t happen as frequently as it seems to; it ends up feeling like you need to have one player always watching the egg.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I think Dodo is silly and fun! The core element is that wobbly egg, and it really makes the game stand out in my mind. It has this distinctly slow, threatening lurch as it moves around the board, getting constantly closer and closer to dropping and ruining your game. I kind of love that. It’s also entertaining to just have to try and build bridges in real-time under an object before it falls, and even just the dice-rolling task alone would be potentially fun. Adding a layer of memory game to the game just ends up making it even goofier, since it’s primarily designed to delay you while the egg makes its perilous journey down the mountain. It’s definitely for kids, don’t get me wrong, but the Expert mode adds enough extra memory matches that you have to make that it creates a good level of stress for players. You have to focus and you have to play fast, otherwise you’ll get the unsatisfying “donk” of the egg hitting the table. I also kind of love that it’s too heavy for the boat? The egg, I mean. It essentially weighs it down in a near-comical way. But at its core, Dodo is a game for the whole family that adds a nice blend of speed and memory to create a fun challenge. If you’re looking for that, you love a large egg, or you just want to prove that you can build bridges better than anyone, I’d definitely recommend checking Dodo out! It’s a hoot.
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