Sheep 'n' Sheep

EvEvanstar4,6

In this game of cute sheepy cards, you put out a display of four sets of two cards. On your turn, you either draw one of the sets of 2 into your hand, or you play cards from your hand. The way you play cards functions similarly to Arboretum. You choose a lead card in your tableau, then you can play a path of cards leading away from the start card, but the trick is that you can only play all cards with the same number, or cards in a sequence of number counting up or down from your start card. THEN the trick is that each cute colored sheep wants to be in linked groupings consisting of exact numbers equal to the dots printed on the sheep. So, pink has one dot, so pink doesn't want to be next to pink for it to score. Green has three dots, so you want three greens together for them to score. There's also three majority scorings that get awarded at the end of the game for features on the sheep. THEN you also lose one point for each card's worth of height and width that your tableau extended to. I enjoyed my plays of this game, but each time my playgroup had a difficult time understanding how you play your cards. At four plays it also starts to feel the same game to game. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment