Happy things … pigs, salmon and gaming!
It’s been a happy week of board gaming. First up, my order of Happy Salmon has arrived! Squeee!! I first played this awesomely fun card game over a month ago at the Game Boy Geek’s house, and I’ve been patiently waiting for it to be finally released. It’s all mine! And I may have purchased an extra copy or two …
I also decided to buy Happy Pigs using my gift card to Game Depot that I won on International Tabletop Day. The pigs in this game are so freakin’ cute, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this is a kid’s game. It’s an economy building game where you try to get the most money from buying, feeding, mating and selling pigs.
Happy Pigs plays 2-6 people and plays for about an hour. One of the reasons I picked up this game is that it runs on the shorter end of 6-player games. My friends and I have been playing a whole heck of a lot of Survive: Escape from Atlantis recently because it plays 6 people well. Happy Pigs is now another option for when we have that many people playing.
The game plays through 16 rounds, four rounds per season. The goal of the game is to have the most money after four seasons. In each round, players secretly and simultaneously choose one of four actions: Buy, Feed, Mate or Sell.
When you choose the Buy action, you can buy pigs, tiles and/or fields from the market. The pigs come in four sizes (piglet, small, average and large) ranging in price from $3 to $15. You can also purchase for $1 each a vaccine, dietary supplement or amulet of life. I’ll explain what these tiles do later below. When you buy pigs, you place them on your field boards. All pigs must fit in the borders of your field.
When you choose the Feed action, all your pigs increase in size. At this point, you can spend a dietary supplement you have to increase your piglet or small pig twice in size.
When you choose the Mate action, every average and large pig you own produces a piglet. At this point, you can spend an amulet of life to produce a small pig, which is the next size up, instead.
When you choose the Sell action, you sell your pigs back at the market’s value. You remove the pigs from your field, place them back into the pile in the middle of the table and collect your money.
In each round, a season card is flipped over. This is where I think the coolest mechanic of the game lies. Each season card has numbers next to each action tile representing the maximum times that action can be taken. So when everybody flips over their action file, people who picked the same action must split up that number. If two people chose to Mate and there’s a 9 next to the Mate tile on the season card, then one person gets 5 (the person closest to the first player), and then the other person gets 4 Mate actions.
If you don’t exhaust all your actions in a round — such as you choose to Mate and get 4 actions but only have 2 pigs that are capable of producing piglets — you get $1 per leftover action. The season card also has some kind of effect or bonus for the round. There are 6 cards for each season, 2 are removed for each game to give games some variability.
Lastly, at the end of each season (4 rounds), all unvaccinated pigs die. This is where vaccines come into play. You can spend a vaccine at any time to vaccinate a pig. When you do this, you just flip over the pig tile and it’ll show the same pig with a red cross on it and a Band-Aid on its body. Once you vaccinate a pig, it’ll be vaccinated for the rest of the game.
The game plays out over 16 rounds, and after resolving the last season card, all players will get to sell their pigs back to the market and collect money. The person with the most money wins the game. In case of a ties, players sell back their fields and item tiles for cash, and the person with the most wins the game.
Lastly, Memorial Weekend is upon us and that means it’s time for Strategicon’s Gamex board-game convention in LA. My friend and I are heading over there again for four days of non-stop gaming. I’ve been looking at the schedule and planning things out. I’m currently signed up for a game of Megacivilization, which is slated for …. wait for it … 14 hours. Yes!! This will beat my Virgin Queen record, and, from what I’ve heard about Mega, the game moves along quickly and is loads of fun.