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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | Ludorum Games | Ice Flow

Ice Flow

Price: £24.99

Board Game; 2-4 Players; Ages 11+ by Ludorum Games ICE FLOW is a family strategy board game. You oversee 3 explorers crossing the icy waters of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia - on foot! Use drifting ice floes as ‘stepping stones’ on your trek from east to west. Climb pack ice ridges using rope, and avoid polar bears using fish. The first to reach Siberia with three explorers is the winner! ICE FLOW is a 2-4 player game which is simple to learn, but with tactical strategy enough to interest the \'gamer\'. GAME REVIEW BY COUNTER MAGAZINE Ludorum Games 2-4 players, 45-75 minutes designed by Dean Conrad and John Streets reviewed by Stuart Dagger A group of explorers - all of them women if the rule book is to be believed - have decided to race across the Bering Strait. Being Yorkshire women, and therefore both as tough as they come and anxious to save money, they have further decided to do this on foot. Ice Flow is the second game from the White Rose County\'s leading games company and follows on from their debut game, Fagin\'s Gang, which Alan reviewed in issue 37. The board shows the Pacific coastlines of Alaska and Siberia, and the sea between them is banded into ocean currents, some flowing north and others south. Ice bergs drift along these and the idea is that the explorers hop from one to the other. To do this successfully you will need supplies in the form of rope and fish, and will also need to cope with the dangers caused by the presence of polar bears. Each player has a team of three explorers and the winner will be the first to get all three across. They begin spread out among half a dozen stations on the Alaskan Coast. The set-up procedure also sees the players combine to place a dozen ice bergs in the Strait. For each of these, and this will also apply to those introduced later in the game, a card is drawn to tell you what mix of rope, fish and polar bears is placed on the tile. You begin the game with one rope and one fish on your ``rucksack card\'\' (a notional ``supply depot\'\' that serves all three of your team) but you will need more of both to complete the crossings and it is up to your explorers to pick them up en route. The ice floes themselves are hexagonal tiles with a mixture of smooth and ragged edges. The ragged edges represent ice ridges that make entry to the floe more difficult - necessitating the use of a rope. On your turn you take both an ice floe action and an explorer action. The former involves either bringing on a new ice floe at the entry point for one of the currents, rotating a floe through 60 degrees, or moving a floe. With the third of these the path and the distance travelled is determined by the current, with floes moving slowly near the coast and quickest mid-Strait. There is also a restriction to stop negative play reaching the silly stage: rotating or moving a floe is only possible if either it contains no explorers or at least one of your own. The possible explorer actions are moving and fishing, and it\'s a case of choosing one of them. To move an explorer from one floe to an adjacent one is free provided both tile edges crossed are smooth; each ragged edge crossed requires the sacrifice of a rope. Explorers can also cross open sea hexes for the cost of a fish but must end their move on an ice berg and can\'t swim across more than one consecutive sea hex. An explorer can travel as far as you wish in a turn provided you can pay the costs. If the explorer ends their movement on a floe that contains rope or fish, they may pick up one of the items, but only if this leaves you with no more than three items in your rucksack. The other way that you can gain items is to forego movement and collect an item from one of the floes where a team member is situated. Fishing is an alternative to moving/collecting and allows you to sacrifice a rope for a couple of fish. To step onto an ice flow that contains a polar bear you have to distract it by sacrificing one of your fish. If you are just passing through, the matter ends there. You have thrown the fish towards the bear and run past. However, if you wish to end your movement on the floe, you need the bear to leave, and here the idea is that you have thrown your fish out to sea and the bear has swum after it. It will keep going in a straight line until it either exits the board or reaches another ice flow, at which point it may become someone else\'s problem. Ice Flow has a strong and original theme. It is a daft one - ``Please rotate this ice berg through 60 degrees, as I wish to step on to it\'\' - but that doesn\'t matter because it\'s fun. It is also well integrated with the game\'s mechanisms and was clearly the driving force for them. Despite this, at its heart the game has more in common with a multi-player abstract than it does with strategy games such as Brass or Agricola. In those you win by scoring points and there is a variety of plans you can choose to follow. Here the plan is the same for everybody: get your three pieces from A to B as quickly as possible by trying to set up a favourable configuration of ice floes. Tactics and spotting opportunities are more important than grand strategic plans. In making this point I am not being critical, simply describing the type of game this is. It is the abstraction and lack of a hook to catch the imagination that puts many people off purely abstract games even when the game play they offer is interesting. With Ice Flow you have that type of game but with an engaging story to keep you amused. The age rating on the box is 11+, which means that the publishers see the game as a gamers\' game, but the strong storyline, allied with an objective that is easy both to explain and to understand, makes the game just as suitable as a family game. And in fact if I\'m to play it as a multi-player, I\'d sooner play it in the latter form. The reason for this is that gamers like to calculate every time their turn comes round, and the more players you have, the more of those calculations you have to sit through before your turn comes round again and the more complicated - and therefore longer - each of them is likely to be. Then there is the issue of ``first player advantage\'\'. There is no form of slip-streaming that I can see in this race and no ``equalisation of turns\'\' at the end, so going first must give you an edge. In a family game this is no bad thing since it allows for a bit of discreet handicapping, but gamers playing among themselves are more competitive and prefer their starts to be level. The production is first rate: top notch components, good graphics and a clear, well organized and well illustrated rule book. Ice Flow represents a large step forward for Ludorum. Fagin\'s Gang was a good first effort, but although it had an interesting central mechanism and had been well developed, the combination of rather dull graphics and the lack of a strong connection between the game play and the theme meant that it didn\'t really excite. At least, it didn\'t here in Aberdeen. Ice Flow, as its comfortable win against strong competition of the ``best new game\'\' prize at UK-Expo showed, will have much wider appeal. When I spoke to them in Birmingham they told me that they ``hadn\'t made a loss\'\' on Fagin\'s Gang; with this one they should move significantly into profit. It wasn\'t my personal favourite of the games launched at the Birmingham show, but it has a good theme, well thought out mechanisms and deserves to do well.

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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | Ludorum Games | Ice Flow

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