Skor

We picked up Skor at Barnes & Noble this weekend.  It looked like a simple piece placement game with enough variables to get interesting, and that's exactly what it turned out to be.  It can be played with 2 to 4 players.  We had two players as usual.

There is a game board and a box full of big chunky discs representing shields, each with an outer (wood) color and a center (metal) color.  Each player in a 2-player game starts with four of these shields, and they each turn you place one on the board (see below for other rules).  You capture pieces by making combos of 3 or more of a kind, matching the outer color OR inner color on all three pieces.  After each turn, you grab discs from the box to bring your total back up to four.

If that's all there was to it, it would just be a tic-tac-toe game with captures.  The outer and inner colors make it essentially two simultaneous tic-tac-toe games.  But there are two more rules: (1) you can put a shield on top of another shield if the outer or inner colors match; and (2) discs where the outer and inner colors are the same are called "double shields", and if you play one of these you get to play a second disc on the same turn.

We completed two games while mosquitos were coming after me.  We sprayed my arms with Off!, but they started biting me through my pant legs.  It felt like a solid game that had enough challenges to be interesting.  We were still not 100% clear on exactly which moves were valid.  Like usual, I started with the most basic rules, just matching outer/inner colors.  In our second game, I added the stacking and double shield moves, which did spice it up more.  On most turns, there were a lot of possible moves to choose from.  I won both games, but only by 5 or 6 shields.  

Comically, our personal style of play made us put down shields as defensively as possible, trying to block captures wherever possible, and we were good at clogging up the board.

We kept the captured pieces in stacks of 6 so there wasn't so much counting at the end -- just count the stacks and only count the singles if needed.  

Our only complaint was that the colors were not as distinct as they could be.  The orange brown and reddish brown colors are very similar, and the brass versus copper center colors were also not entirely clear.  The outer/inner color matches were also not as exact as we felt they should be.  The blue colors really stands out, but bronze plus red brown, gold plus yellow brown?

Also, we saw no reason to limit the double shield rule to just one per turn.  It should be a lot of fun to play a double shield, get your free move, play another double shield for another free move, and so on.

It should be fairly simple to record the moves in a game of Skor.  The board would be labeled A to E at the top and 1 to 5 down the sides.  The pieces would all have two-character names based on outer/inner color, so BB for blue on blue.  A move would simply be a turn number and which piece is played on which space, and then the start and end of any set of pieces removed.

I can picture a lot of strategy in my head.  We will definitely try it a few more times.  We don't play a lot of purely tactical games, but this is simple enough to learn in 10 minutes and slowly master over many games.