You may find it on our shelves as Tres Fute (The French version), it basically means ‘Very Clever’ in English, whatever the name, the game is just fantastic and has taken the staff at the cafe by storm. If you walk by in the afternoon recently you may have seen Natasha in the window playing it on her own, trying to break her own cafe record score of 293.
It’s designed by game designer wunderkind of the last couple of years, Wolfgang Warsch. He also created last years mega-hit ‘The Mind’ and Kennerspiel winner ‘The Quacks of Quedlinburg.’ His thing is making games that create moments of excitement, whether it be pulling a chit you really need from a bag (Quacks), putting down a 23 then a 24 (The Mind) or in this case chaining a whole bunch of bonuses together to get mega points and feel very clever.
At it’s heart this is just a dice game. You roll 6 dice, pick one and dice lower than that go on the silver platter. Repeat 2 more times and then your opponents get to pick one of the dice on that silver platter for themselves. You cross out boxes or put in numbers in one of the 5 scoring areas. They all score in different ways and will eventually give you bonuses in different ways. In the first 2/3’s of the game it feels like you’ll barely score anything, but then suddenly your score will explode in the last third, which is where the magic happens. You’ll get a bonus for filling out a row, which will allow you top put an X in the blue section, which completes a column, which lets you put 6 in the purple area which gives you a Fox. What does that even mean?!?! It doesn’t matter, what matters is when it happens, your like ‘BOOM! Eat my Points!’ It feels awesome!
It’s take a little learning to get your head around the scoring and bonuses (it was nominated for the slighly more complicated game of the year and lost to The Quacks), but its very straighforward once you understand it.
It’s also great as a solo game, for real! I’ve played it around 60 times now, I’ve even had to buy a new score pad cos I used all the sheets in the game…when does that happen!
Trust us on this one, it’s so good.
