Main Catalogue |  BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES |  Burley Games |  Take It To The Limit

Take It To The Limit Price: £24.99 Board Game; 1-6 Players by Burley Games Take It To The Limit is two games in one! Choose either the Nexus board, for that ultimate challenge, or the stylish Orchid board, for a quicker and distinctly different game. Both options can be played by up to six people, but can also provide hours of fun when you attempt to beat your \'personal best\' score by playing Take It To The Limit as a solitaire game! +++++++++++++++++++++ Counter Magazine Review +++++++++++++++++++++ 1-6 players, 25 minutes plus designed by Peter Burley reviewed by Stuart Dagger Peter Burley\'s Take it Easy is a game that no gamer\'s house should be without. We are all used to meeting people who, on learning that we play boardgames, ask, ``you mean, like Monopoly?\'\'. And if they are in your house when the topic comes up, their nervousness that you will corral them into playing something is all too apparent. With a copy of Take it Easy you can break the ice for those whose curiosity is even half genuine without making any of them regret it. The rules and object of the game take about two minutes to explain and a ``hand\'\' about 15 minutes. If they enjoy it, you can play further hands; if not, you can go back to discussing the contributions of Rupert Murdoch to British cultural life. In Take it Easy, each player has a set of 27 hexagonal tiles, each of which has three coloured stripes, one running between each pair of opposite edges. Associated with each colour of stripe is a number - yellow 9, orange 8, green 7, and so on down to grey 1. One player, who will be the caller, puts all their tiles face down and shuffles them; the others place theirs face-up in a tidy fashion which will make each easy to locate. Each player also has a hexagonal board made up of 19 smaller, tile-sized hexagons. The caller then draws tiles one at a time, announcing what each one is. All players, including the caller, then place this tile on their personal board in a space of their choosing. This continues until everyone has a full board. The hand is then scored. For each monochrome stripe running from edge to edge on your board, you score the number of tiles times the value of the tile. So, a row of five 9s scores 45, while one of three 2s is worth just 6. What you are being asked to do is not really any more complicated than checking off the numbers on a bingo card, but what turns the business from a sociable form of gambling into a proper game is that throughout the process you are constantly having to take decisions. In the early stages these will be about where you are going to try for your rows of the high scoring numbers and later on it will be about where to place the unhelpful tiles so as to cause least damage. The game was published by F.X. Schmid in 1993 and made the SdJ short list the following year. That edition had tiles for up to 4 players, but in 1997 they produced a second one that could take up to 8. It is a perfect game. Gamers will relish the roller coaster ride as hopes are raised and dashed and non-gamers will like the fact that they don\'t have to worry about what anyone else is doing, have some interesting things to think about and can blame any defeat on the fact that the right tile didn\'t appear at the right time. This new game, Take it to the Limit, is an extension of Take it Easy, which refreshes things by giving players a couple more things to worry about. The number of different coloured stripes has gone up from 9 to 12. With the standard orientation of the tiles, that means 4 possible colours in each of the three directions, making for 4x4x4=64 tiles for each player. 32 of the 64 are also marked with a sun symbol; the others with one for the moon. The other thing you notice is that among your 64 tiles are two which have a gold `80\' in the middle and six which have a silver `40\'. These are `bonus\' tiles and are split equally between the suns and the moons. The player boards are double-sided, one showing the so-called ``nexus board\'\' and the other the ``orchid\'\' one. Each player also has a smaller board called the ``scrapyard\'\', which is used in conjunction with the nexus board. The nexus board is significantly bigger than the one in Take it Easy, having a central column of 7 hexagons and 4 hexagons along each edge - making 37 spaces in all. All 64 tiles are used and play proceeds just as in the original game, with the caller drawing tiles one at a time and each player putting the called tile somewhere on their board. The difference this time is that you can put the tile either on your main board or into your scrapyard. Play continues until both are full, at which point both boards are scored. The main scoring on the large board is just as in Take it Easy, but this time there are bonuses. If you have managed to complete all three of the stripes running through a bonus tile, you score the full bonus; if you have completed just two, you score half. You also score 10 points per tile for your longest row that is composed either solely of sun tiles or solely of moon tiles. That completed, you turn your attention to your scrapyard. The tiles here won\'t add to your score, but they could bring you a 60 point penalty. The score for this smaller board is the highest of the following: (a) the total of the best three rows in your scrapyard; (b) the total from the best two silver bonus tiles in your scrapyard; (c) the score from the best gold bonus tile in your scrapyard. If the score from your scrapyard is less than 60, you incur the penalty. As you can see from this description, although the play is largely unaltered, the extra elements in the scoring mean that you have a lot more to worry about when forming your plans early in the game and in deciding what to sacrifice when the bad tiles appear. This game is not for beginners, but experienced players will love it. Play on the orchid board is simpler. It is smaller (22 hexagons) and you only use half the tiles (either the suns or the moons, whichever you agree on before the start). There is still a scrapyard, but it is smaller (just 3 hexagons) and the rules governing it much more forgiving. As before, tiles are called until both boards and scrapyards are full, and it is up to each player where they place each tile. Once the draw is completed, the tiles from the scrapyard can be added to the main board in special spaces that its design reserves for them, but adding them is not compulsory. So players can use the scrapyard either as a dumping ground for unwanted tiles or as a holding place until they see how things develop. The bonus tiles work just as before, but with the rows being shorter, they are easier to score. As an introductory game this version will work just as well as the original. The worry when someone takes a simple game and does a second version is that they will complicate it and spoil it. That hasn\'t happened here. With Take it Easy, you find after a time that each hand starts with an early decision on whether to settle for the five 9s down the middle column or the more risky two columns of three 9s down either edge. That settled, you then turn your attention to doing as well as you can with the 8s and 7s. The new elements that have been added to the scoring shake you out of that particular routine by giving you other, and sometimes conflicting, possible goals. The new goals have also been well calculated: the bonuses are high enough to be worth going for but not so high that getting them is compulsory; and the bar you have to clear to avoid penalty when using the nexus board is set at a tough but makeable level. Matthias Hardel, the editor of Spielbox, gave the game a `10\' in his review in the latest issue. I haven\'t settled on a number yet, but it is going to be at least a `9\'. More ...

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