Sequoia

Game 26# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Sequoia” played with Jack(9) and Katie(37).

“Sequoia” is a fairly simple dice game that is easy to play and actually rather compelling. You start by laying out the forest cards on the table in a clock pattern starting from 2 and going up to 12. You’ll realise that playing up to 11 cards in a circle is significantly more difficult than laying out 12.

You then assign the first and second tokens to each particular forest card and give each player a selection of treetops and matching coloured dice.

On your turn, you roll all of your dice simultaneously and secretly. This raises an issue where you need to ensure that your child is going, to be honest, and roll this secretly and properly because there is a possibility that they could just make up their rolls to get what they want and win the game every time.

Once you roll your dice, you split your dice into two pairs and leave one die out. Everyone then simultaneously reveals their pairs, and each player places a tree token on the forest card that matches their pairs. You keep doing this, and after 10 turns, the game finishes, and you score the forests.

The player with the most trees gets the first token, and the player with the second most trees gets the second token. You add up all the scores, and the player with the highest score wins.

On the face of it, “Sequoia” is quite simple, but the risk-reward aspect of deciding which number to go for and whether to fight over a contested number or leave it for a different number, having already invested two or three trees on one, is quite compelling.

The simplicity here is why this works really well. As long as you’ve got children who can add up to 12 and, more importantly, have the honesty to roll the set of five dice and split them into pairs without cheating, you could play this game with a relatively young child.

We really enjoyed “Sequoia.” While I wouldn’t say this is an absolutely essential purchase, it is a really good game that I really enjoyed, and if it’s the sort of thing that you think could appeal to you, I would recommend it.