Win Over Smug Owls, Predict Frog Colors, and Help Your Community Survive

July 28, 2023

• Connor Alexander of Coyote & Crow, publisher of the Coyote & Crow RPG, has designed a semi-co-operative game for 3-6 players that’s funding through August 7 on Kickstarter and due out in Q1 2024.

Here’s an overview of Wolves:

You take on the role of a community leader attempting to manage limited resources to help get your people through the winter. To survive, you need to co-operate and share through the gifting of what you’ve gathered and grown, which will dwindle as you head toward winter.

If any player fails to meet their community’s needs, all players lose the game — but if everyone makes it through winter, the player who gained the most status will be elected chief of all of the communities and granted an additional victory.

Status is gained through efficient gifting of resources to other players and sharing excesses with your own community. Phases of each turn are played either simultaneously, or in status order, which can change from turn to turn.

• Runaway Parade Games, publisher of Fire Tower, has released Smug Owls from designers Mike Belsole and Grace Kendall.

The design falls into the Apples to Apples family of “judge games”. Each round, flip cards from the “magic deck” to create a never-before-seen riddle. As soon as you have an answer, slap your hand on the table; when only one player is slapless, they become the judge, listen to the answers, and award points for their favorites.

• German publisher Loosey Goosey Games has released games featuring chinchillas, ducks, and butts, and for 2023 it’s adding two new types of animals to its catalog.

Lunar Laser Frogs is a real-time, sort-of betting game for 3-8 players from company owner Andreas Preiss. Each player has a set of five cards: pink, blue, yellow, gray, and blank. On a turn, the active player rolls six dice, taking exactly three turns to do so and spacing out the rolls as they wish with no re-rolling. The dice sides are blue frog, pink frog, yellow frog, blank, blank, and some combination of the two colored frogs.

At any time during a player’s turn, each other player can throw exactly one card face down into the box. After finishing the rolls, the active player chooses one player and will score as many points as they do. How many will that be? Well, the player flips over the cards and reveals them one by one. The first blue, pink, and yellow card score 1 point for each time that color appears; any later blue, etc. cards score nothing. The first blank card scores 2 points per blank on the dice, and the first gray card scores 1 point for each card played ahead of it.

One twist: If a color doesn’t appear on any of the six dice, it is “lasered” onto all of the dice. The blanks disappear! That color is worth 6 points! If you chose the player who played that card, you get 6 points! Play rounds until everyone has gone 1-3 times depending on the player count. Pew, pew!

• Surfosaurus MAX is a 2-6 player card game from Ikhwan Kwon in which you’re trying to score each round by being part of the best hand of cards.

Each player has a hand of seven cards, with the deck containing seven suits of cards numbered 1-12. In turn, each player lays a card face up in front of themselves, then they do it again, and in a game with 2-3 players, they do it again, drawing a replacement card each time.

You then determine the highest “poker” sequence that can be created from four or five cards (depending on the player count), with a straight flush being best, followed by four/five-of-a-kind, a flush, a straight, and high cards. Ties are broken in favor of higher numbers, so if a six-card straight is the highest hand in a round with four players, only the four largest numbers score. Each scored card is worth 1 point; if cards are tied, e.g., you have two 12s in a four-card straight, then the tied cards are worth .5 points.

After 1-3 rounds, the player with the most points wins.