Aye carumba. That's a lot of blathering about nothing.
We had a quiet weekend at the cottage this week; no guests, and few of the island's inhabitants made the trip. This surprised me a little, what with it being the last long weekend of the summer. Maybe it's because it was promising to be a cool and wet weekend? I dunno. Maybe they were dropped on their heads as kids. I know I wasn't about to pass up a weekend at the cottage.
It was a little cool, and there was the occasional sprinkle of rain. Just enough to send us inside for a board game.
We played a lot of Fast Track. This is a Fast Track game board made by handy dad (he stole the idea from someone else). It's a fairly simple game, easy for everyone to pick up - including the kids, and yet wildly frustrating. You need the board, 4 pegs per player, and a deck of cards for each player.
The rules in a nutshell:
The board is a circuit, around which your peg-dudes move. They start out "in jail" as we call it (like the purple guys in the photo). Once they get out of jail, they work their way clockwise around the board to their coloured "home" (like the orange, or green guys in the photo). If you land exactly on one of the points on the board (coloured triangles) your "dude" is in Fast Track, and can jump from point to point, rather than taking the long way around.
On your turn you flip over the top card of your deck to see how you move. Different cards effect the way your little peg-dudes move:
- To get a peg out of jail, you need an Ace, a 6 or a Joker.
- All cards let you move your peg according to their face value (A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). Face cards and Jokers are move 1.
- Aces, 6s, jokers and face cards also let you "go again" to flip over another card.
- The evil 4s make you go backwards by 4, however.
The first one to get all of their guys into their "home", wins. You can't leap frog your own pegs, but you can jump those of other players, and you if you land exactly on another players peg, they get sent back to jail (the frustrating part).
Oh, and if you can land on the centre spot exactly (i.e. land on a fast-track+1), you can jump back out at the fast-track point of your choice when you flip any face card.
That's it. It's stupid fun. The kids are completely hooked.
I don't even know if you can buy these boards. I've seen 4-player variants, as well as a version that used marbles in place of pegs. It's all really the same game.
You should come and play with us. It will make you swear.
No comments:
Post a Comment