Think Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, carousels, flying swings, and bumper cars! Open your Carnival for business before the other carnies do by building four of the five available rides along your Midway. Then cue the Carnival music and watch the crowd rush in!
Carnies everywhere rejoice! Now you can bring a piece of home/work with you while you are at home/work. Carnival is a card game of set collection for 2-4 players, ages 12+, that utilizes dice to determine actions. Player take on the roles of carnival bosses, trying to build rides along their Midway and open for business before all the other carnies can! Each turn, a player has the choice to roll three dice and chooses two of them to perform various actions that will allow them to gain cards from the deck, discard pile, their opponents’ hands or even steal valuable ride parts from other Midways. The coveted Wild cards are versatile: players can use them to fill in for missing parts on their rides or can discard them to refresh the cards in their hand. Each player also has three Tickets which may be discarded to affect the dice rolls or block other players’ actions. The first player to complete 4 out of 5 rides wins!
I am a board game geek. I play a lot of board games, card games, and dice games. I buy them. I collect them. I enjoy them. I have a respectable collection that gets a little larger every week (or so my credit card statement says). Carnival was a welcome addition to my collection as it was the first game I ever received after becoming an official backer on kickstarter.com. If you are not familiar with Kickstarter I suggest you mosey on over there after reading this. Be careful though, it is very addictive. I am currently backing another 4 games that are already funded and will be shipping in the next few months. Somebody, please help/stop me.
The first thing I noticed when I received my USPS package, tore it open, and carefully placed it on my desk at work was the art and graphic design looked just as good, if not better in person. Board games sometimes loose a little of the glitz and glamor you see on the ol’ PC screen once you open them. Even with that new game smell, buyer’s remorse can quickly set in if the art doesn’t hold up. Carnival certainly retains the feel they were trying to capture of going to a carnival when you where a child, eating cotton candy until you were sick, and being in perilous danger when you were on, or near, any number of rides.
Next, I noticed that the components were also of excellent quality. The playing cards where very sturdy and will hold up over many, many shuffles while the thick cardboard tickets and dice board will last even longer. Of course one would expect cards and pieces to be decent quality when making any legitimate board game purchase, but as I noted above, I did not know what to expect from the first game released (Carnival) by a brand new company (Dice Hate Me Games) on a website that was completely new to me (Kickstarter.com). As I continued to unbox the game, which is a major highlight for any respectable geek, I noticed the thematic wooden dice then the special Collector’s Dice for being a backer. They were a very nice touch because they retained the charm of the game aesthetic while not having that cheap and just-an-afterthought feel that many dice can have in even some higher quality games. Dice quality? Yeah, we went there. If you find these types of things interesting I can point you to an interesting podcast about dice quality and the consequences they can have on games. No? I understand.
Now, let’s talk about gameplay! Once my girlfriend and I deciphered the rules which should have been a lot easier considering they were only 1 page, we discovered a very fast-paced and charming game. Very similar in feel to Monopoly Deal (the card game), we found this game to be a lot more interesting in theme and execution while integrating more components to play with. As stated above the object of the game is to build 4 rides before your opponent does. To build a ride you must lay down four parts cards (Banners, Lights, Materials, and Seats) of a particular ride (Bumper Cars, Carousel, Ferris Wheel, Roller Coaster, and Swings) in your Midway space in front of you. Sounds simple, but there are hand limits, stealing, blocking, and luck of the dice to deal with. Who but their dentists knew carnies had it so rough?
Overall, I am very happy with my purchase and proud to have helped Dice Hate Me Games get off the ground. It is not a perfect game (instructions could use some tweaking and house rules would improve some of the mild clunky game mechanics), but a fun filler game to play while waiting for another game to open up on game night. Or you could play it during a quite evening with your boyfriend/girlfriend if you don’t mind sleeping on the couch for stealing their Roller Coaster Seats to complete your Midway Natural Set. Or, like in my case, easily losing to my girlfriend while she looks at me with those eyes that say I’m not the board game geek she thought I was.
Until next game…
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dicehateme/carnival-a-deck-and-dice-game?play=1&ref=search
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/101930/carnival
http://dicehatemegames.com/games/carnival
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