Base price: $20.
4 players.
Play time: ~60 minutes.
BGG Link
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Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Gnaughty Gnomes was provided by New Mill Industries. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the preorder, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Back with more trick-taking games! It’s been a pretty good time for reviewing games; a lot of fun and interesting titles to kick off the start of the new year. I’m sure there will be more; trick-taking is a pretty expansive genre, and I’m really excited to see more games coming out with trick-taking as a mechanic. But we’ll get to those as they come. In the meantime, let’s check out Gnaughty Gnomes! Coming soon from New Mill Industries.
In Gnaughty Gnomes, you’re in charge of a team of gnomes looking to pick up mushrooms! Unfortunately, your opponents (gnomeponents) want mushrooms as well, so you’re going to fight for control of the best foraging spots! Work together to play cards, figure out your turn order, and eventually take control of the best spots to find the best mushrooms. Will you be able to win this battle?
Contents
Setup
As with many team-based games, players should sit across from their teammates. Choose a start player, and shuffle the four X cards, dealing each player one. Then, shuffle the other cards, and deal each player eight. Then each player gets eight of the gnome markers in their team’s color.
Place the Suit Strength Card and the four Turn Order Cards:
Shuffle the suit tokens and place them in a random order on the Suit Strength Card:
Then, shuffle the hex cards and place them so that the white hex is in the center and then the other twelve are added around it (row of four, row of five, row of four).
You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Gnaughty Gnomes is a game of trick-taking and area control! Your goal? Earn as many points as you can for your team.
This trick-taking game is pretty interesting, in that it’s a may-follow game. Normally, you have to play a card of the same suit as the led suit; here, you don’t! Play whatever card you want. Once everyone has played a card, evaluate who won the trick! This is done by ordering the cards by suit, from strongest to weakest (on the Suit Strength card), and breaking ties by the rank of the card. The strongest card gets the 1 Turn Order Card (and a bonus point), and the weakest gets the 4. If a player plays the X card, they can choose a value (and “low” or “high”, to break ties).
Now, the fight for area control! Each player in turn order places one of their team’s gnomes on the board, with the following caveats:
- Each player must flip over a card of their choice and play on that color. Since gnomes are played on the overlap between one or more hexes, you’ve got some options.
- The player order determines how many tiles your gnome can touch. The first player’s gnome can only touch one hex, the second player’s gnome can touch up to two hexes, the third player’s gnome can touch up to two hexes, and the fourth player’s gnome can touch up to three hexes.
- After placing a gnome, check for scoring: If you create a new majority (or a tie) on a hex, you score points! If it’s an outright majority, get the points for that color indicated on the Suit Strength Card. If it’s a tie, you score half (rounded down).
After that, the Suit Strength might change! The suit strength token for the winning card is moved to the space corresponding to the winning card’s rank. Then, the player who lost the trick leads the next one. Once the eighth round is played, the game ends, and the team with more points wins!
Player Count Differences
The game is limited to four players, so, that’s kind of it. There’s a two-player variant mode, though I didn’t get a chance to check that out.
Strategy
- Try to have your team collectively manage your turn order. You probably don’t want to go first and second every time; try to win tricks to push your overpowered suits lower in the suit ranking, or work on playing cards that are low so that you can go later. There’s some advantage to going one after the other, but you can also do well alternating with your opponents. Particularly, going last lets you be the most reactive, but you also have the most restrictions on what color you can play on.
- Take cues from your partner and vice-versa. Try to see where they’re playing; they might be trying to open up a tie for you or going after a spot that they want you to also defend. Similarly, if they’re already going to be last, it might not be worth undercutting them to go last yourself. Work together!
- Outright majorities are, of course, better, but ties aren’t bad. If you get an outright majority, you get more points from placement. That’s good! But, you can’t always get that (since you can’t go straight from your opponent’s majority to yours without a tie). With a tie, you just get half as many points (rounded down).
- You can always place on something you already control either to reduce the points its worth (making it a tie) or to make it less appetizing for an opponent. There’s something to that. You can’t get any points, but you might be able to make it difficult for your opponents to make a play for that specific area. You might even get them to not place on a particular tile at all! It’s a solid defensive move and not a bad idea if you’re going first.
- Similarly, making contested areas gradually less valuable by winning tricks with high cards of that suit can be pretty useful, long-term. The strength of the suit and the value of those tiles are connected, so as you play certain cards, you can raise or lower the value of tiles. If you’re seeing a lot of conflict, you can try moving the value down, making other players less likely to go after it.
- You’ll make a lot more points from area control than the 8 points you’ll get from winning every trick. It’s worth knowing what to focus on.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- This one can be kind of a doozy, in a fun way. There’s a ton to think about! You’re not just trying to manage winning tricks; you’re doing a lot more. You’re managing turn order, you’re managing area control, and you’re managing the relative strength of suits. It’s a lot of things happening at once, which is great if you’re into that.
- The team-based area control is fun, too. You have to take turns and try managing who gets to take what. There’s some balance and strategy to that because typically, going later means you have a better shot of getting points, but going first means you can rebuff attempts by your opponents to take over your areas.
- I appreciate the consistent box size of these games. It’s pretty portable, which is pretty nice.
- Strategically, it’s really interesting how you need to play cards to manage the relative strength of the suits so that you can put yourself in optimal spots in the turn order. You don’t really want to always be going first, as you let your opponents react to your moves every time. But, depending on your cards, you might have trouble not going first. As a result, you need to use the cards you have to move around the various suits to try and make your hand stronger or weaker.
- Additionally, the turn order limiting what cards you can pick makes things even more intriguing. Very much a game for fans of area control and trick-taking. I really like this part, since you can mess with what your opponents can do on their turns if you go first. You can limit them to certain colors or take a color out of contention. Some consolation if you’re stuck going first (along with the point).
Mehs
- A “may-follow” game doesn’t necessarily always feel like trick-taking since you can really play any card you want. It’s not a huge deal and debating whether it’s trick-taking or action selection is outside of the scope of this review, but I do like the strategic element of being forced to play certain cards. I think here, instead, it’s about managing where your turn order is in the trick, which can be just as complicated.
- For games where I have to keep track of scoring changes, I do like some included way to do so. I ended up just finding an old receipt and making tally marks, which is … fine.
- I’d also like more explicit statements on what I can share with my partner; I don’t necessarily want to be able to tell them where I think they should place their token, as that would open the game up to a lot of quarterbacking. I think it’s pretty reasonable to have a “don’t tell your partner what to do” policy in the game, but I’d like the rules to be a bit more explicit than they currently are about communication. I could see another version of the game where it’s quite comfortable with just letting players discuss optimal placement and such.
Cons
- A four-player-only game is kind of hard to get people for, at times. This is something I’ve been running into a lot more frequently now that I’ve moved and I’m hosting fewer regular board game nights; you don’t really find yourself in a lot of four-person situations as a single adult. It’s decently easy if you’re two couples, but otherwise you’re more likely to end up in a two-player situation or something. As a result, I tend to bristle at four-player-only games; they’re just less flexible than other things that I would more usually play.
- It’s kind of a bummer that the “gnomes” are just little discs; makes the game a bit more abstract. I just wanted little gnomes to place and patrol; I think it would have been neat.
- It would be great if there were some way to indicate the current majority holder for a tile; especially with an influx of ties, there’s a lot of confusion round-to-round. I think the game ostensibly expects players to remember who has the majority on each tile, but in the games I played, we just couldn’t quite keep it together. A little coin or some extra player tokens would go a long way (and make the game move a bit faster).
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I like Gnaughty Gnomes! It’s pretty challenging, but there’s a lot going on and that’s pretty cool! This one’s definitely for players who are looking for something a bit more in-depth, though. Balancing the trick-taking elements on their own can be pretty challenging, but adding in area control really elevates and escalates it. I think that it unfortunately also limits the number of folks I can play the game with, just because it’s a game that demands a decent level of experience with trick-taking. It is kind of striking that it’s also a may-follow game, since it further challenges the mold of trick-taking. Is it a trick-taking game? Is it action selection? I try to avoid getting embedded in debates on taxonomy. I do see this game landing well among the advanced trick-taking crowd who are looking for something new and complicated to cut their teeth on. For me, I love the ebb and flow of how strong certain suits are and trying to figure out how to manipulate that, especially with a partner in the mix. It can be a mess, a joy, and a challenge all at once. Pretty fun. I do wish it would see more play with my various groups, but I think we have to work up to it. If you’re a trick-taking aficionado, you love some area control, or you are really just into gnomes, you’ll probably enjoy Gnaughty Gnomes! It’s tough but fun.
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