3 small games from our UKGE loot

With our limited suitcase space at UKGE'24, I was happy to find some fine small box games at the convention. In this post I wanted to highlight 3 of them, all from Helvetiq. I especially love the thin-strip design of the cards that easily fit in their small boxes. 🥰

1️⃣ First the easily best one: Odin. It's a card-shedding game: you want to get rid of your cards as fast as possible. Each round you start out with 9 cards (there are 6 colors with numbered values 1 to 9), and the round ends when someone plays their last card. Every other player gets points equal to the number of their cards. When someone reaches 15 points the game is over, and whoever has the least, wins.

Your goal is to play cards with a higher value than the previous cards - you can play up to 3 cards (digits) together, if their values or color match. E.g. playing a 2, 3 and 4 would be ‘432’. To put a twist on things, after playing you have to take back one card from the previous number.

First it all seemed a bit random, but there is really skill involved in what you play and what you draw back. The more we play, the more we grow in love with it. It has that quick, fun, ‘just one more' feeling that e.g. Love Letter has.

2️⃣ Hygge is much simpler. About tidying up the house before guests arrive I guess? 😅 Cards are laid out in a pattern. On your turn you can take a row or column of them - these are either items in different colors, or animals with paw symbols. At the end of your turn you can optionally choose matching items with an animal and add them to your scoring pile. This is the main puzzle: if you wait more you could potentially add more items, but you could also get stuck with too many cards outside your scoring pile, which are negative points when the game ends.

3️⃣ Finally, Bandida is a co-op card laying game. Games start out with Bandida in a cell in the middle. You have to prevent her escape by playing cards to close all open paths. Cards all show some kind of tunnel configuration, often with crossings. You have to cleverly loop paths into each other so all the exits disappear. It's a pretty simple concept but I like the idea!