Finding Nemo

Finding Nemo turned out to be a fun little game.  It's easy to learn and each game is only about 7 or 8 minutes long.  Perfect for a spare hour before a 1-year-old's birthday party.

The board is a network of tubes with some pieces missing, and you get to add and remove tiles to complete paths to the ocean, or break paths around your opponents.  Each turn you roll two dice, a red one that says how many tiles to place, and a blue one saying how many spaces you can move.  It flows very nicely.  It's fun trying to use the tiles to your best advantage, and confound the other players with broken paths they can't use.

Overall, it does rely heavily on how the dice fall.  You can make it all the way to the ocean only to roll a bunch of zeroes and never make it to the start space.  But we did have a few games with odd decisions moments we had not seen before.  Which says that, while the target age is 5+, there is enough strategy to be casual fun for grown-ups, too.

In this last shot, the tile next to my blue piece was five deep at one point, as we kept adding and subtracting to keep my guy in/out of the ocean.  Fun stuff.