Matthew BaileyI hope we are not the only family where everyone seems to be constantly ill from October to March. I think we have been to the GP 3 times this week to get stuff for ear infections, sudden atopic eczema, and conjunctivitis.
Anyway, we got Henry(1) to bed early and in a rare moment of family time the remaining 4 of us (Katie, Toby(4), Jack(7) and myself) played “Honk!”
Full Disclosure: A copy of the game was provided for free by the publisher for the purpose of review. Our thoughts and opinions are however our own. (the kids couldn’t give a monkey as to them every game daddy buys is “free”).
So the general concept of “Honk!” see you set up the game by placing golden eggs on the table and a pile of geese. Each goose has food icons on its tummy.
On your turn, you can either collect 2 different food cards (there are 5 different types) or discard cards you already have in your hand to pick up a goose that matches those cards. Pickup up a goose also gives you a regular egg (worth 1 point each), and a bonus egg for each goose of the same breed (there are 8 ) already in that player’s collection (meaning strategically it is better to get multiples of the same type). Once you get to the bottom of the pile you get to keep any revealed golden eggs that are worth up to 3 points each. To make it slightly more difficult you also can only pick up geese that are not covered by another goose. You can also only have 7 cards in your hand so if you pick up to more than 7 cards you must discard down to 7 (more on that in a minute).
It’s a fun and simple resource collection game that remind me of “my first” Century, Splendor or something similar. The boys enjoyed it but there were a few issues…
Firstly the rule “A goose can only be fed if it is on top of the gaggle, with no other goose covering any part of it” is very unclear… and we had much “heated discussion” as to what that meant. Does that mean if it’s touching? What about if there is an overhang and there is 2mm between the card above another card. Can I pick up the bottom card as it’s not actually “covered” by anything? This rule is not clear which wasn’t ideal.
The other issue is the fact you can continuously pick up cards (discarding down to 7) and cycle your hand essentially skipping your turn. This meant that later in the game where there was one goose on top of a good card that would net multiple golden eggs no one wanted to pick it up thereby negating their chance at the golden eggs. This meant we got into a stalemate situation which could have just gone on forever. In the end, Katie just picked it up to finish the game but this is a situation I can see cropping up in pretty much every game you play and there needs to be a mechanic to fix this (forcing a player to pick up a goose if everyone cycles cards on a single turn for instance).
The component quality is good. The cards have a nice finish on them, and the big chunky geese are lovely. The box could do with some sort of insert and I worry over time the geese will get damaged jiggling around inside the box.
It’s a fun little game on paper but it needs a bit of house ruling, in my opinion, to make it work. With the ruleset printed in the box however it has a few fairly major issues
