Roux Dat: Finspan Sharks & Reefs, 12 Rivers, French Toast

Our recent game night accidentally had a theme. Usually, we are mixing in a game or two that we haven’t played, but all three were games that Mitchell and I have played before, a refreshing change from learning new rule sets each week. 

My review copy of the expansion to Finspan called Sharks & Reefs just arrived this week from Stonemaier Games, and both Mitchell and Jeremy had played it before. Finspan is a more streamlined version of Wingspan that focuses on building an ecosystem with fish. It simplifies the game in some ways, most notably in giving each player six workers each round that have very limited combo ability (unlike in its older sister). 

Sharks & Reefs surprisingly adds more shark cards and a new reef mechanic. Hmm, I guess that isn’t much of a surprise at all. Since there are a ton of cards, in this particular session we did not notice that much of a difference with the added shark cards. But I loved the new reefs. Players get a small board to lay across their player boards meant to hold reef tokens in three different colors (corresponding to the three columns of habitats for your fish). Certain actions will give you these reef tokens, and the goal is to get as many as you can for scoring, and if you can, complete the entire reef to score bonus points. 

Sharks & Reefs is a tiny little addition that gives you one more small thing to think about when laying out your fish and taking actions, because generally speaking, you have to spend a resource like cards or fish eggs to get those tokens. I don’t see any reason not to always play with this expansion.

Next up, we returned to the land of 12 Rivers from Good Games Publishing where eleven moving bodies of water just isn’t enough. We played this at Southern Board Game Fest on the hot games table, and we set it up at SoBo specifically because it has such good table presence. Since it had only been a few months, the rules came right back to me. Players are placing tiles from their hand during each of five rounds to ‘dam’ up the rivers flowing down an elevated board. The goal is to snag different colors of pearls that will be released at the end of each round. Collecting those pearls helps us score points on our visitor tiles, and there are special cards and tokens that can juice up our turns. 

It starts as a pleasant little game, until it’s not, because the special actions and tokens and dam spots can all affect and impede other players’ turns. But since there is almost always enough pearls to go around, and even a mechanic where you can push your luck by taking the very bottom dam spots to get whatever is left over, the interaction is there but not in a cruel fashion. So far, I’ve been terrible at this game. I’m always a step behind everyone else when it comes to grabbing the right colored pearls or the right villagers to visit. But, struggles like this make me want to play it again to get better. It does not surprise me that this was originally a game about warriors collecting pearls before they re-implemented it. 

Finally, we had time for a quick party game, and I had brought back French Toast from Allplay from Dice Tower East. It’s designed by Peter Hayward (who has also designed Things in Rings and Fiction and a ton of other games) Would it work with only three players who are also streaming at the same time? Of course! It’s a perfect little party game to end the night. 

Players are trying to guess the secret word that the alien learned while visiting Earth. But since the alien only knows one word (French Toast), we have to make guesses while teaching the Alien new words. It’s very fast — the whole game only takes about five minutes, not counting chatting between rounds — and it’s both frustrating and flowing at the same time. When the players are in a groove, throwing out guesses that steer right to the alien’s secret word, it gives you a very clever, team-building feeling. But when the players are struggling to even get nouns out, which happened to me a few times at the con, it can be very frustrating especially watching that fast timer go down. Love French Toast — both the game and pain perdu, the meal — and I cannot wait to teach it to my little nieces and nephews this weekend. 

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo

** Complimentary copies of some of the games mentioned were provided by the publishers. **