Matthew BaileyToday, we are going to look at “Kites,” a cooperative, I guess, time management game in the most literal sense of the word. Played with Jack (.8.).
Firstly we probably spent a good 5 minutes discussing whether the game was called “Kites Time to Fly” or “Kites” with “time to fly” being a tagline. In the end, we went with “Kites” as per the BGG page.
The concept of “Kites” is fairly simple: you have six egg timers in front of you which run out at different rates. You start the game with all the egg timers on this side and not moving. When the game starts, you turn over the white and Tyler, and all players then look at their hand of cards, which have different colours on them.
When you lay a card, you either stand it up if it’s lying down or flip over the timer of the colour or colours that are printed on the card, with the general conceit being that you have to keep flipping the timers so that none of them run out. The white timer is a wild card and can be turned by laying any single colour. This continues in real-time with you taking turns until either you fail by letting a timer run out or you run through the deck.
Once you are confident with the general idea of the base game, there are challenge cards that can be placed into the deck that perform other actions when drawn, such as the storm card that turns every sand timer at once, the crust lines card where you have to swap cards with another player, or the aeroplane card that means you cannot speak. While none of these are particularly difficult, they are usually enough of a distraction that means you stop focusing on the sand timers, potentially for long enough to fail the game, especially the red timer that is incredibly needy and needs flipping quite literally all the time.
Jack and I really enjoyed this. I’m not normally a fan of real-time reaction games, but in a cooperative setting, this actually worked really well. This isn’t a game that I would want to play over and over again, and after we played twice, once with and once without the challenge cards, I knew that this was a good game to have as a warm-up to a longer game session.
Games only last about 10 minutes and don’t overstay their welcome.
Production values are acceptable but could be better. The egg timers are well-made, although the screen printing on the end of them is a little bit iffy, and most of mine were not central. The cardstock is really shiny, which makes the cards less appealing to hold, and they also have a fairly unusual shape. As usual, this is probably me being overly picky. The box it comes in is nice, and I like the beach-themed insert.
I really like “Kites.” It’s not an absolute must-play, but this is definitely a game that I would recommend if you are looking for a reasonably simple reaction time game or something that is a little bit different from other games you might have in your collection.
