Brain Games BGP5168 Publishing Ice Cool - Flicking Action Dexterity Game for All Ages - Kids, Family, Adults, and Gamers

Product Information

There is a very small degree of numeracy required, but it can be bypassed (and indeed, to the game’s improvement) by simply summing up the number of fish that were captured. That in itself can be a task of comparison instead of arithmetic. In that case some kind of running total of wins would need to be kept if the element of competition is important. Really though you can just put two piles of collected fish beside each other and ask which has more – that’s the winner of that round. The ice skates and random points need not be a feature of play, but they’re not particularly cognitively expensive to include if you want all elements of the game preserved. As play progresses, the Catcher takes turns to try and hit the Penguins to eliminate them from the game and to collect fish cards to add to their score. The round ends if a Penguin gets through each door and collects all the fish or the Catcher eliminates all the Penguins. The rounds continue until each player has taken a turn to be the Catcher, whereupon you total up your points to find out who is the winner.

Boom, that’s it – you and I could sit down (or stand up) and play a game of Ice Cool right now. And we should! I mean, not right now but you know – when are you next in town? Oh, sorry – I’m actually busy then. Look, I’ll call you with the details. Haha, yes – quite. No, I’m not going to say it. Look, because… oh fine. I will slide the deets into your mentions, fam. Players gain victory points for catching others or for collecting fish. When either the Catcher has caught all the Runners or any of the Runners has collected their 3 color fish, the round is over.

Before your first Game

None of this would translate directly into an obvious recommendation, but I will say that if visual accessibility is an issue and people have the right mindset, Ice Cool is about as visually accessible a dexterity game as we’ve ever encountered to date. Cognitive Accessibility This is a game that I think only works if everyone is equally bad. I won’t even say equally capable, because I don’t think this is likely to be a fun game if competence can be assumed. One of the things we talk about here on Meeple Like Us is accessibility – you may have noticed. One of the features of accessibility in the area of games is that sometimes the inaccessibility is where you find the fun. Warnng, video below is NSFW: The good-natured hilarity of failed shots is constant. This, along with the risk of getting caught, keeps players focused and engaged. The energetic gameplay adapts to a variety of group sizes. Combining with Ice Cool 2 caters for up to eight penguins. The result is more moments of tension and relief, catastrophe and victory. And more people to share those with. Given how competitive some of us are (sibling rivalries, anyone?), you can imagine how ICE COOL can – and will – become the smash hit of the evening at your games night.

As to memory, game state indicators are given for every part of the game. You know if you’ve been hit by the runner because they have your ID card. You know which doors you have left to go though, because the fish pins are still in place. You know where everyone is because you can see them on the board. You usually even know who just took their shot because their penguin is almost certainly still bobbing its head in recovery. The game ends after as many rounds as the number of players (each player will be the Catcher once). Count the victory points from your fish cards and the player with the highest total of victory points becomes the winner! Don't forget to also count your revealed ones! The Catcher has to catch the Runner twice before the round ends. When the Catcher touches the Runner for the first time, he takes away his ID card as usual. Then the Runner is moved to the Classroom and the Runner immediately takes a turn starting from the red circle like in the beginning of the game. The Catcher's turn completely ends and he cannot play two fish cards with value 1 to take an extra turn before this immediate turn of the Runner. Every time a penguin goes through certain doorways they’ll get a fish (and take a fish card, worth varying points). Every time the hall monitor player bumps into a naughty penguin, they’ll ‘confiscate’ their hall pass, and also earn a fish card for their snitching. There’s no formal need for communication during play. None of the cards have anything written on them that requires literacy, and the only noise will be that which you provide yourself as excited commentary to the action.Ice Cool is a dexterity game for 2-4 players that takes about 20 minutes to play. Ice Cool plays best with 3-4 players. Game Overview: Ice Cool is entertaining because of the player interaction. Playing almost feels like a sport where the penguins are an extension of the players. There's a sense of achievement to difficult manoeuvres. Curving arcs through doorways, or jumping walls to catch your friends. Players come together sharing those moments, often with a cry of "Did you see that?!". The game consists of as many rounds as there are players (except in a 2 player game). In each round one player is the Catcher and the other players are the Runners. Each round consists of 3 phases: Phase 1 - Round Setup What’s interesting here is that even though the penguins come with ID cards, they’re not actually clear enough to make out specific details. The green penguin for example could be Aaron Summers, or Angela Samurai, or Allana Sabbatical. In any case, you can flip over the card and the coloured identifier to get a different portrayal. While some of the penguins appear gendered, there’s also a real degree of ambiguity. I think you could realistically project whatever gender identity you liked onto at least one penguin. This is a game that could easily have just ignored the issue of representation and answered ‘Dude, they’re penguins’ when I started ranting about it. The fact that they didn’t is great. I think though that it’s likely to be an issue with vanishingly small relevance – I don’t doubt people can become Ice Cool masters if they want, I just suspect most people won’t want to. While mismatched skill levels are likely to be common, they’re not likely to be mismatched enough to trigger the problems relevant to this category.

Ice Cool is a stupid amount of fun. Not since Coconuts has there been a dexterity game that blew our expectations out of the water. We played this game a ton of times at Gen Con 2016 and the amount of cheering and laughter that erupted while playing this game was unreal. We always seemed to be drawing a crowd of onlookers as people walked by. In 2004 three board game enthusiasts embarked on a mission to grow board gaming culture in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It started with localization and distribution of the popular game “Settlers of Catan” and now Brain Games is the largest board game distributor in the Baltic countries. In 2016, Brain Games released Ice Cool at the UK Games Expo. It was our first year at the expo and we were quite surprised that any games were being released there, let alone one of them going on to win the Kinder Spiel des Jahres (the biggest award for children’s game of the year) one year later. Ice Cool is an innovative dexterity game, with a fantastic pun in its title, about a group of penguins trying to skip class in high school. Let us tell you how it plays. Ice Cool Gameplay The game consists of a series of rounds where players will rotate being the hall monitor and the students. The students want to steal the three fish in their colour without being caught, when one penguin gets all three fish the round ends. The fish are hanging above the doorways between rooms, all you have to do is pass through a doorway to get your fish.Even the box is a work of genius. Brian Gomez and Brain Games have designed a ‘boxes-within-boxes’ creation – the various rooms that help construct the icy arena all sit snug within each other in the main box. Each one is a few millimetres narrower than its predecessor, so they sit like Russian dolls. Rooms are clipped together on your table with wooden fish pegs, which is a neat touch. It quite literally is a big game in a modest-sized box (and it can be combined with ICE COOL 2 to make a humongous layout). It’s a more mentally taxing take on the original game’s premise, but unfortunately it doesn’t take long for this edition to come off the rails. The requirement to collect different cards means that you can spend several turns fishing for the ones you need before you’re actually able to do anything, and it soon becomes frustrating. Rails and Sails adds length and complexity, but it offers little new in terms of gameplay. Also if a Runner at any point during his turn touches the Catcher, the Runner must give his ID card to the Catcher.