That’s Pretty Clever – The Unboxinating!
Today’s Unboxinating features another game which was generously donated to the Library. This game is distributed by Stronghold Games who also have Flamme Rouge, Egizia and Terraforming Mars in their stable to highlight a few of their popular games. That’s Pretty Clever (or Ganz Schön Clever as it was called in Germany) seems to be one of Stronghold Game’s handful of “games of rolling dice and deciding what to mark where on a player sheet”. Brikks, Encore, Dizzle, Ripple Rush and Second Chance all look to be a type of game in this vein.
Number One: Parts. That’s Pretty Clever comes with six dice, a limited resource player sheets pad (booo!), markers for said sheets, rules and the box itself. The dice are wood, which I’m not a great fan of (unless it’s a nice dense wood. Gimmie a little something to roll eh?) but the edges are rounded and I do like the gold stamped pips on the darker dice.
Number 2: Limited resources. I hate them. Hate them to pieces. I will note that these are printed on both sides – solo play on one and multiplayer on the other. If you are going to have limited resources, using all the studio space is appreciated. I went ahead and laminated up 4 sheets for this game anyway, and plopped in dry erase markers so I’m not as cranky about it now. I do appreciate that the game packaging team was thoughtful enough to include 4 regular markers in the box. It’s an undertaking to find something that writes in my house and I imagine that I’m not the only one who could spend a half hour hunting for 1-4 pens or pencils that work. I can see why they went with markers too…those player mats look pretty busy and I’m not sure mere pencils are up to the task of doing whatever needs to be done with this game. That’s a LOT going on in one sheet.
Number 3: I like the artwork and design here. Something about the rules in black with white writing and the floating in space images appeals to me. It’s got a futuristic feel to it and the instructions seem well laid out. In just glancing through the pages, this reminds me a lot of Qwixx except with maybe even more going on. I still have reservations about that play mat but I guess it does what it needs to do in the space that it has.
Number 4: While parts counting this game, I discovered the box bottom has this silver disc printed on a bump up that takes up about 4/5 of the interior. It turns out that during play you use this silver platter to contain dice for whatever you are going to do with them. Not a lot of games incorporate the box itself as part of the parts used in play; I thought that was kinda neat.
Number 5: Two things bug me about this game. The very minor one is that the directions show the silver platter with Ganz Schön Clever on the box bottom but as you can see, that’s on the cover and not the bottom. I’m happy to entertain the thought that the directions used the German edition which might very well have Ganz Schön Clever on the bottom rather than game advertisements (although it amuses me to have SECOND CHANCE staring me in the eyeball on the silver platter side). The other thing which SUPER bugs the daylights out of me is that “That’s Pretty Clever” should translate to “Das ist ziemlich klug” (or alternately “Das ist ganz klug”). Ganz Schön Clever is…close in a “I have an English to German dictionary and I am not afraid to use it” way. “Quite Beautiful Clever” is probably not exactly what the game designer wanted it to read but there you go.
Lastly :
