Brain Games BGP5168 Publishing Ice Cool - Flicking Action Dexterity Game for All Ages - Kids, Family, Adults, and Gamers

Product Information

There’s no formal need for communication during play. None of the cards have anything written on them that requires literacy, and the only noise will be that which you provide yourself as excited commentary to the action. In each round one of the players takes the role of the Hall Monitor (the Catcher) - his aim is to catch the other penguins (the Runners), who will try to collect fish hanging from the doors. Gameplay in Ice Cool is very easy to learn. One player starts as the catcher, while the rest of the players are the runners. In 2004 three board game enthusiasts embarked on a mission to grow board gaming culture in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It started with localization and distribution of the popular game “Settlers of Catan” and now Brain Games is the largest board game distributor in the Baltic countries.

The basic rules and win conditions are the same in a five-player game. With six to eight players there's an extra catcher. In this scenario, the hall monitors work as a team to bring their delinquent peers to account. Because catcher roles rotate, with seven players someone will play this role twice. This unevenness might ruffle the feathers of more particular players. But this game is best for light-hearted play. What’s cooler than being cool? Ice Team. Bad paraphrase of a great song aside , Ice Team is a cooler than cool two-player racing game where players see who can be the first to get their four polar bears across the finish line having collected the most fish from igloos to be crowned coolest of the ice caps. Bear to Igloo Four It’s always good to have different games to the people you often play with, so Amy suggested that we buy a copy of Ice Cool and it has hit the table a few times in the last couple of weeks and sits happily among our heavy games like Terraforming Mars and A Feast for Odin. Ice Cool 2 is a standalone expansion, meaning you can play the expansion without needing the base game (although its way better if you do have the base game, more on that later). The components in Ice Cool 2 are nearly identical to the original. There are 4 penguins and matching fish in different colors from the original. The cards have gotten a bit of an upgrade with the addition of tasks on the 1 value cards. A player can also use two value 2 cards to move any fish to a new doorway. The box setup is also very similar, being a mirrored version of the original. Finally, the rulebook has gotten a bit of an upgrade and is much clearer now.Also if a Runner at any point during his turn touches the Catcher, the Runner must give his ID card to the Catcher. The video above shows an extreme scenario of real skill. Even the effect of more modest levels of increasing ability has a corrosive impact on the game at multiple levels. Imagine one player is better than everyone else – not superb, not reliably excellent, just better. The fun everyone else has degrades in line with the skill differential. You’ll be in the line of fire more often than you’re not during Ice Cool, and your only defense is the inability of the catcher to actually hit their penguin where they want it to go. Playing with uneven skill levels here is to unbalance everything with no obvious way to fix it. It’s not that you’ll get a runaway winner – it’s that competence acts as a kind of sandpaper to everyone’s fun. It’ll wear it away until there’s nothing left at all. The round ends when either a runner has collected all their fish, or the catcher has collected all the other player’s ID cards. At that point, each players draws a VP card for each ID card they currently have in their possession. None of this would translate directly into an obvious recommendation, but I will say that if visual accessibility is an issue and people have the right mindset, Ice Cool is about as visually accessible a dexterity game as we’ve ever encountered to date. Cognitive Accessibility

The hall monitor wants to catch the students by bashing into their penguins. Should you succeed, you take their hall pass, and should you get all the hall passes then the round ends. Fish and hall passes are all traded for scoring cards which can be one, two or three points, though as a bonus, collecting a pair of one’s allows you to take an extra turn. Once everyone has been caught by the hall monitor the game ends and you count up the points on your score cards. Amy’s Final Thoughts The game consists of a series of rounds where players will rotate being the hall monitor and the students. The students want to steal the three fish in their colour without being caught, when one penguin gets all three fish the round ends. The fish are hanging above the doorways between rooms, all you have to do is pass through a doorway to get your fish. Final Score: 4.5 Stars – A fantastic dexterity game that’s both unique and an absolute blast to play.The round ends when either one truant penguin has collected all their fish, or when the hall monitor has confiscated all the hall passes. Then fish are returned to the starting set-up, a different player becomes the hall monitor and everyone plays again. (Everyone will have one round of being the hall monitor.) Whoever collects the highest total of fish on their cards wins the game. More of a social experiment than a game, Sneaky Cards challenges players to complete a series of quirky, off-beat tasks: take a selfie with a stranger, hide a card in a public place, make an impassioned speech in a crowded lift. When you complete a challenge, you will pass the associated card on to someone else, who then has to attempt the task themselves. The result is an ever-growing chain of players, some of whom will have been drawn into the game completely unsuspectingly. The artwork on the game boxes is also expertly done. The school-house has a lot of nice, thematic touches to really help to bring the theme home. The ID cards are also dual sided, with a male or female avatar on each side. The VP cards come in denominations of 1, 2 or 3 and depict increasingly larger plates of fish.

Players gain victory points for catching others or for collecting fish. When either the Catcher has caught all the Runners or any of the Runners has collected their 3 color fish, the round is over. It’s hard to know really how transferable my life experience is, so I’m going to break this review of Ice Cool up into two different parts – one for a middle aged UK audience, and one for everyone else. If you grew up in the UK during the eighties, turn to review 1. Otherwise, turn to review 2.We’ll strongly recommend Ice Cool here because the big problem is likely to be something you don’t encounter, and the smaller problem of score randomness can be solved by simply counting accomplishment rather than the face value of cards. Physical Accessibility Ice Cool is a very short game, if you want it to be – the formal game rules say everyone takes a turn at being catcher and it’s over but it’s a tournament style thing that is amenable to all kinds of other modes if it’s necessary to worry about discomfort. That’s useful, because since this is a game of getting up and moving about it might be a little more taxing than most of the games we tend to look at here. It’s not exactly an aerobics class but you do need to orbit the game a lot to find the right positions for what you want to do. In 2016, Brain Games released Ice Cool at the UK Games Expo. It was our first year at the expo and we were quite surprised that any games were being released there, let alone one of them going on to win the Kinder Spiel des Jahres (the biggest award for children’s game of the year) one year later. Ice Cool is an innovative dexterity game, with a fantastic pun in its title, about a group of penguins trying to skip class in high school. Let us tell you how it plays. Ice Cool Gameplay Each Runner attaches one of their fish tokens on each of the three doors marked with the fish symbol.