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In any case, to kick off my weekly video game overviews once again, I chose Block Ness, a quick-playing design from Laurent Escoffier and Blue Orange Games that I've now played six times on a review copy, twice each with two, three, and four players.
Gameplay is reminiscent of Bernard Tavitian's Blokus in that you're trying to place as many of your pieces on the board as possible. You start the game with your shortest — that is, your not-tallest — piece in the deepest part of the loch, with your head on one end and your tail on the other. On a turn, you place one of your pieces orthogonally adjacent to either your head or tail, then move that head/tail to the end of the piece you just placed. If you have no free spaces next to your head, then your head is stuck and can't dive into the water again to surface in a new location, leaving only your tail free to do so.
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End of a three-player game
Each player has a set of ten "Nessie" pieces; those pieces come in six heights and different lengths, with your set differing from each other player's set in small, but meaningful ways. You can place a piece that crosses or completely covers a shorter piece (or multiple pieces), but you can't place a piece under an existing piece, and you can't cross someone's head or tail because that would violate the social norms of Scottish culture.
You use a larger or smaller part of the game board based on the player count to keep space limited, so you must ensure that you don't cut off your own avenues for escape when moving around — but if you can cut off avenues that other players might use, then go ahead and do that, as I somehow managed to do in the four-player game depicted below.
Respect the purple wall!
In the end, whoever has placed more of their pieces wins, and if players tie — as was the case in the 4p game above as Orange and I both managed to place all of our pieces — then the player whose head rises highest wins. This rule is a nice kicker on the simplicity of everything else because it makes you hesitate on "wasting" the single tallest piece available to you.
Aside from the smart, simple gameplay, publisher Blue Orange Games has made smart choices with the packaging, dressing up a perfect-information abstract strategy game in bright colors and a fun setting that will likely get it to far more tables than if the design looked like the archetypal "serious" abstract strategy game. Besides, I doubt you could reasonably recreate these pieces in wood in a functional way.
For more thoughts on the game and see examples of play, check out this overview video:
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