IMPflakes
Designed by Martin Stewart
Complexity rating:
★★★
You will need:
- Imp cards
- Imps
- Cubes
- Screens
- Bag
All these components are found in The Dark Imp Cracker Games. NB: You’ll need the Kickstarter version of the Cracker Games with all the different colour cubes in to play IMPflakes. In later versions, most cubes are the same colour.
Set up
Each player has their own player area in front of them to organise their cubes, with a collection area to the left and a snowflake area to the right. The snowflake area will be where players place cubes to form a snowflake pattern comprising six symmetrical branches, with each branch containing a line of up to three cubes. Each player chooses a colour and receives the imp and two cubes of that colour, placing the imp standing on both cubes in front of their player area. The remaining cubes of their chosen colour are placed in the bag. In games with less than 6 players, the imp and cubes of any colours not chosen are removed from the game.
Place the six screens flat in the centre of the table. Blindly draw and deal 3 cubes from the bag onto each screen.
Shuffle the imp cards and deal 3 face-down to each player to form their hand. Each player may look at their own cards. Place the remaining cards in a face-down stack in the centre of the table to form a draw pile. Reveal the top three cards, placing them in a line to the right of the draw pile. The space to the left of the draw pile is reserved for a discard pile.
Randomly select a starting player and give them the bag. They are responsible for drawing the cubes.
Object of the game
Get the most points by creating the best snowflake pattern.
How to play
ON EACH ROUND
Each player has a turn to take one main action and possibly up to two bonus actions, discarding from the game one cube from under their imp for each bonus action taken (thus, there are a maximum of two bonus actions for the whole game). When taking more than one action, the same action can be taken multiple times.
The actions available to a player are:
1) Take an imp card from the line or the draw pile into their hand. There is no limit to how many cards a player can have in their hand. When a card is taken from the line, its place is refilled by a new card from the draw pile. If the draw pile ever runs out, reshuffle the discard pile to form a new draw pile.
2) Play an imp card from their hand into the discard pile and take the 3 cubes from the screen with the corresponding number into their collection area. Each player has a limit of 18 cubes allowed in their player area. When cubes are taken from a screen, 3 new cubes are drawn from the bag to replace them. When the bag runs out of cubes, no more cubes are drawn.
3) Play an imp card from their hand into the discard pile and take a number of cubes up to the number shown on the card from their collection area and place them into their snowflake area. Once a cube has been placed into the snowflake area it cannot be moved or rearranged.
End game and scoring
The game ends at the end of the round in which at least one player has placed 18 cubes into their snowflake area.
Each player scores points as follows (note, a cube can be scored in more than one way):
- 1 point for each cube in their snowflake area.
- 1 point for each cube in their snowflake area that matches the colour of their imp.
- 1 point for each symmetrically matching pair of cubes that are on directly opposite branches in their snowflake area.
- 3 points for each unused bonus cube remaining under their imp.
The player with the most points is the winner. In the case of a tie, ties are broken in order of the scoring list above, i.e. first tie-breaker is the tied player with the most cubes in their snowflake area, and so on.