Update: Reviews and a sieve game

A Doughnut Dash Review

We’re Not Wizards has reviewed Doughnut Dash… and it’s a great review. Here’s the summing up. 

“I like Doughnut Dash. I like Doughnut Dash a lot. I like how the game teaches directions and spacial awareness, I like how it forces the player to not always make sub optimal decisions and learn how to compensate for those decisions. I like the hurt and rescue mechanics for some of the doughnuts and I like how it tries to make sure that players never gain too much of an upper hand. I like the fact it teaches tactics and planning without making it feel you are being taught. Doughnut Dash really surprised me, and if you are looking for something that will bring a lot more than most games designed for family play, then you should definitely consider adding this to your collection.”

A Sieve Game

Sometimes your brain doesn’t compute the things you hear. On a board game podcast I was listening to, one of the presenters referred to a game as a ‘Civ Game’. I’m familiar with the nickname – it means a civilization game, of course. But I heard it as ‘a sieve game’. The casual nature of the reference made me think this was a game mechanism that I’d not heard of… and got me wondering what the sieve mechanic was. I realised my mistake within about 10 seconds, but by that time, my thoughts were on the sieve. The result is The Sieve Game.

In The Sieve Game, each player has a large grid on which they will draw different polyomino shapes – from size 8 down to 2 (a domino). Each round four cards with different shapes on are revealed. But before the cards are shown, players must set their ‘sieve size’. A sieve size of 8 will let all the shapes ‘fall through’ – all four shapes must be drawn on the grid. A smaller sieve size will stop the player from having to place larger shapes. For example, setting your sieve size to 5 will mean that the player only places shapes that are size 5 and smaller. Shapes of size 6, 7 and 8 will not be placed by this player. 

When a player reduces her sieve size, she cannot go back up to a larger sieve. The move is one way. She may reduce her sieve size further on any round. She may skip sieve sizes. When a player is unable to place a shape in her grid, she must move over to a smaller grid. Again, this is a one way move. When the smaller grid is filled, she goes bust with any shape that falls through her sieve but can no longer fit. 

Unfilled spaces on the large grid are multiplied by 10. Unfilled spaces on the small grid are multiplied by 2. The size of busted shapes are multiplied by 5. Players total scores and the lowest score wins.

The Sieve game has been playtested in several versions this week – all reasonably successfully. The first version of the game had different scoring, which rewarded players who kept their sieve size very high and rushed to the end of the game to catch others out. Now, there is a huge draw to fill up your large grid and leave as few spaces as possible, because empty spaces are so punishing to the score. Which makes the decisions more interesting. 

I’m going to do a YouTube live broadcast about the game and the variations tomorrow – Sunday 21st June at 11am. Subscribe to The Dark Imp on YouTube to watch.