OUR REVIEW

Even Spiders are nice

Zebra-Schwein

WHen combined with a Frog

 „Recently a „Zebraschwein“ is a huge attraction for tourists in Longchuan (Provinz Guangdong). The pig has white strips on his brown body of 110 cm length and 65 cm height. The pig weighs more than 80 kilograms.

Furthermore, the front right leg is completely white, while the other three legs are black! Xie, the owner of the pig, mentioned that the pig was born looking completely normal and that the stripes suddenly appeared at the age of three months. Experts suppose that the pig suffers from a chromosome anomaly.”

This notice from back in 2006 came to my mind when I had my first encounter with the new game from Schmidt Spiele, because a friendly grinning pig with black stripes was laughing off the cover of the box.

After opening the box you place six boards into the middle of the table; each of these boards is marked with a dice face showing 1 to 6 dots. On each of the boards you randomly place one of the 30 animal tiles from the box. If it is your turn to draw you roll two dice. The dice cup and a cover ensure that other players cannot spot the result the of the dice roll.

You look at the result of rolling the two dice to learn which animals you must combine in your drawing for the new animal that the others must guess. Should both dice show the same result you show the dice to the other players and roll both dice again for a new combination.

A pencil and a pad of paper are included in the game and you now try to draw or sketch the new animal. It is not necessary to draw a perfect image but it is important that one of the other players recognizes the combination of animals. Should a player believe that he knows which animals have been combined in the drawing he grabs the zebrapig and presses it?

Zebrapig? What’s this? Something absolutely fantastic, a 12 cm tall pig made from plastic, soft plastic, and when you press it it grunts, but in a way that you want to press it again and again, because the grunt is so realistic!

This is the signal for the drawing player to set aside the pencil and for the guessing player to make his guess. When the guessing player did guess wrongly, he is out of the game for this round and the drawing player can resume work on his drawing. When the guessing player was correct - whereby it is absolutely correct to name the two animals in any order, zebrapig is as correct as pigzebra - both the drawing player and the guesser are given one of the animals that were combined in the drawing.

Pencil and paper are handed to the next player and the animals that were taken off the boards are replaced with two new ones from stock. The game ends when there are not enough animals left to replace missing animals on the boards and the player who could collect most animals wins the game, in case of a tie there are several winners.

Emely Brand has already been involved in the creation of Mogelmotte at Drei Magier and has shown that the offspring is picking up the parents‘ act and are paying tribute to them. Emely and Lukas Brand are the children of Inka and Markus Brand, who have already given us some wonderful evenings with their good games.

The basic idea for this game is simply and has been well implemented, children can easily grasp and play it and therefore it is not always necessary that an adult is present. By the way, even children who cannot sit still for a longer period love to play this game.

The animal pictures on the tiles so far have elicited a „how cute” from all the children!  Especially the young ladies had nice and intense discussions on the topic of what’s more cute, the polar bear or the turtle, and “oh, look, the spider isn’t nasty at all!

But, still, you should give a few hints to the children at the start of the game, especially when playing with adults. After rolling the dice and taking note of the results one should not look directly at the boards to check which animals are there; in the first few games I guessed eight out of ten animals only by watching children’s‘ eyes.

Also, each player should try to let his personality guide his drawings and not just copy the animals on the tiles. When you adhere to this it will result in funny, interesting and very impressive drawings, offering a lot of surprises what one’s children draw when you give free reign to their imagination.

Players: 3-6

Age: 6+

Time: 20+

Designer: Emely & Lukas Brand

Art: Anne Pätzke

Price: ca. 21 Euro

Publisher: Schmidt Spiele 2012

Web: www.schmidtspiele.de

Genre: Drawing game

Users: For families

Version: multi

Rules: de en fr it nl

In-game text: no

Comments:

Wonderful family game

Can be very well played by children alone

Attractive, cute illustrations

Compares to:

All drawing games with guessing at the images

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 6

Kurt Schellenbauer:

All in all a mature and felicitous creation of the Brand family offspring and by Schmidt Spiele, where the game was very nicely implemented, we are curiously waiting for more of their games!

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 0

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 3

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 2

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 2

Action (dark green): 3