Next up was a game by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, which is among the nominations for this year’s Spiel des Jahres. Nige normally likes Kramer/Kiesling games so was keen to try this, even though I warned him it was very much a family game.

The idea is very simple and sounds uninspiring: Roll the die and move either your piece or one of the neutral ones. However, there’s a bit more to it than that and there is a fair bit of turn angst. Each space either has a value (some positive, some negative) or the ability to turn a negative space into a positive one. When you move off a space and yours was the only piece on it, you remove the space and place it in your scoring area. If other pieces are on the space when you move off it, the space remains in play. Therefore, as you move around the track, you try to collect positive spaces and avoid negative ones unless you also manage to pick up a modifier. Then a high negative suddenly becomes a high positive. Once everyone has completed the track, scores are totalled and the player with the highest positive total wins.

The game often has stages where people are moving neutral pieces just to stay on a valuable space in the hope that another player is forced to leave it before you. After a good start, I got caught in this way by being obliged to move my own piece when a neutral piece was unavailable to be moved. I also made the mistake of only collecting one modifier space. Nige and Mark G were battling hard over the last modifier and when Nige was finally forced to move off it first, his troubles were compounded by landing on and remaining alone on a few more negative spaces which everyone else had already passed. His final score was an embarrassment to behold. John, on the other hand, timed his moves very well and came out a comfortable winner.

I thought this was an excellent family game and a very good choice for finalist of the SdJ. Even Nige thought it was OK for a 'fun' game.