Players: 2-4
Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

This is a review of the German edition, produced by Gold Sieber Spiele. As far as I'm aware there are no current plans for an English edition of the game.

The Components

Iglu Iglu comes with:

• 1 gameboard
• Wood Bits:
  • 16 Inuits
  • 8 igloos
• Cardboard Bits:
  • 56 ice floe tiles
  • 28 fish
  • 10 polar foxes
  • 4 polar bears
• 4 player aids
• 1 rulebook

Gameboard: Iglu Iglu comes in one of the larger German box sizes, and the advantage of this gamebox size is that often the boards are produced with just one fold in them. This is the case of Iglu Iglu, which contains a large, two-panel board. It's produced on untextured cardboard.

The majority of the board is taken up by an 8x8 grid with land at the corners. There's some fine artwork around the edges depicting Inuits working. The palette is very subdued, all whites, blues, and browns. I'm sure it's very appropriate for the setting, but I find it a tiny bit dull, here and elsewhere.

Wood Bits: The wood bits are all high-quality Germany manufacture, cut into appropriate shapes, then painted the four player colors (red, blue, yellow, and green). The Intuits look like eskimos or penguins, depending on who you ask. They're quite nice except for the fact that they're very top-heavy, and fall over at the drop of a hat; some of our players found this very annoying. The Igloos are cute little half spheres.

Cardboard Bits: The cardboard bits are all printed on surprisingly thick and sturdy cardboard. Unfortunately the die-cutting is bad. It takes quite a bit of effort to punch out the pieces and they all have residue at the edges afterward. It's the type of die-cutting that I tend to see in American manufacture, not German.

All the pieces have fine artwork, but most of it's in a dull pallette again.

The 56 ice floe tiles are quite clever. They show the ice sheets on the front, and then have special pictures on the back depicting what they do. Many of them are instaneous effects, but some you can keep, and these are clearly marked on the back with a red border. Other than one red tile ("Thaw") we all find the icons pretty intuitive and easy to use within a few turns.

The fish and polar fox tiles show food animals. Each is marked with a number from 1 to 3 and a unique picture for that number. The "1" and the "2" unfortunately look quite similar in the font that was selected, and that tended to cause problems. The fish tiles are also too big; you often have to put three in a space, and there really isn't enough room for that.

The polar bears show angry bears, along with the number "4", which is how much they're worth if you manage to kill them.

Player Aids: There are player aids in each of the four player colors (which is great, because it makes it obvious who's who). They're nicely designed, with the front showing all the tile backs (including distribution counts) and the back listing things you can do during a turn as well as end-game scoring. It's all in German, of course, but I still found them quite helpful during play, as I could easily see how many of each tile there were, remind myself sort of what they did, and also see the four tasks I could do with my action points.

Rulebook: A four-color, glossy rulebook, again in German, of course. It's available in English at Bruno Faidutti's website (so are the player aids, actually). The rules are well illustrated, with examples. Reading them through, I thought they were pretty well written. However, the organization is poor. There are a lot of special case rules in the game, and they're just scattered throughout the rules in a way that makes it hard to comprehend them all. For example the rules for building an Igloo (p. 7) just list how to build, and how much it cost. If you want to figure out what an Igloo actually does, you have to scour the rest of the rules, including learning that it protects you from the red thaw tile (p. 5), that it protects you from polar bears (p. 6), and that it's worth bonus points for end game scoring (p. 8). There were a couple of other rules that were similarly scattered, and as a result we missed some of them during our first game.

Missing Components: The one component notably missing from this game is a scoring track. This isn't a big deal in-game, as you can typically guess how well a player is doing just by glancing at his collected food. However, in the end-game scoring you have to calculate points for each player for each (of several) islands. That's too much to keep in your head, and I ended up summing each player separately rather than being able to do things on an island-by-island basis. If there were a score track, the latter would have been possible.

Whenever I review a German-language game, I try and assess the German-language angst level. This one is low. The player aids and rules are the only components with German text, and you can get exact reproductions from Faidutti's web site. I have printed out English rules in my gamebox, but didn't bother with the player aids which I found plenty helpful as was. I'd like to see this game come out in English, because I think it deserves additional distribution, but I wouldn't see any reason to trade in my German copy.

Overall, the components in Iglu Iglu have some flaws--the tipsy Inuits and the poor die cutting being the standouts--but they're largely quality components that make the game easier to play. On the whole I've thus given the game an above average "4" out of "5" for Style.

The Game Play

The object of Iglu Iglu is to catch the most food on the melting ice floes and capture the remaining islands for your people.

Setup: There's a fair amount of setup to this game. You start out by creating the ice floe. You put 56 ice floe tiles face-down on the 8x8 grid, leaving empty the 4 corners and the 4 center spaces. The fish tokens and the fox tokens are turned upside down and shuffled. Then four fish are revealed and placed in the four spaces in the middle of the board.

Each player selects a color and take either 3 or 5 Inuits (depending on the number of players) and 2 Igloos. In turn each player puts one of his Inuits along the outer ring (edge) of the board until each player has placed all of his Inuits; now play begins.

Order of Play: During a player's turn he takes the following actions, in order:

1. Melt a Tile
2. Take Actions

Melt a Tile: To melt a tile a player takes one of the tiles adjacent to a water space (meaning those center 4 spaces at first, though as the game progresses more water will open up) and takes the tile into his hand. The tile selected can't have anything (Inuit, igloo, animals) on it.

If there's nothing legal to melt adjacent to the sea, a tile in the outer ring can be melted instead. If there's still nothing, the game ends.

It's important to note that when you "melt" a tile, it's permanently removed from the board, leaving a water space (with the exception of pack ice).

Many of the tiles have instaneous effects. These include: fish tiles (which cause 2-3 fish tokens to be placed); polar bear tiles (which cause 1 polar bear to be placed); pack ice (which goes back on the board as permanent ice and gets 1 arctic fox placed); and drift (which lets you move a number of tiles in a row one space into a water space).

Some of the tiles have red borders and you can hold on to them to use later. These include: thaw (which lets you melt an extra tile on your turn, and to melt under animals or Inuits); stamina (which gives you 1 or 2 extra action points); harpoon (which lets you kill any one animal, including a polar bear, without expanding action points); and move animals (which lets you spend 3 movement shared between up to 3 animals, typically meaning you draw food animals to yourselves or sometimes run polar bears at an opponent).

Take Actions: Now you get to spend three action points (APs). You can use this to: move Inuits; hunt; or build an igloo.

Move Inuits. It costs 1 AP to move an Inuit one space on land; or 3 AP to move an Inuit next to a sea square to any other square next to the same sea.

Hunt. You can hunt arctic foxes in the same space or fish in an adjacent sea space by spending AP equal to the value of the food animal (1-3). You can also use a harpoon which lets you take one animal for free, and is the only way to kill a polar bear, which also must be in your space. You collect any food tokens that you hunted; they're victory points.

Build an Igloo. Finally, you can build an igloo on your space, if you're alone in the space. The igloo has three purposes: it protects against polar bears (who usually send you back to a corner of the board if they enter a space with you and you don't harpoon them); it keeps your tile from being melted with the special Thaw red tile; and it provides bonus points for scoring islands at the end of the game.

Ending the Game: The game ends when no more tiles can be melted at the start of a player's turn (because they're pack ice or have animals, Inuits, and/or igloos on them).

At this point each contiguous island of tiles (which doesn't include those corner land spaces) is scored. Each player has a strength on an island equal to 1/Inuit and 2/igloo. The player(s) with the highest strength score the size of the island and the player(s) with the second highest strength score half the size of the island (rounded up, I guessed, but it's not clear).

If a player was on an island all by himself, he scores the square of the size of his island.

Advanced Rules: There's a few advanced rules for the game, which change the scoring of islands (making big islands more valuable) and also allow igloos to interfere with movement. I think I'm going to adopt at least the first for the next game I play.

Relationships to Other Games

Bruno Faidutti has always described Iglu Iglu as a sort of reverse-Carcassonne, and I think that's pretty apt. It's got connected tiles, a similar level of randomness, and a sort of majority scoring.

Overall I'd probably call Iglu Iglu a tile-removing game with an action-point system and limited majority-control scoring.

The term tile-removing is sort of arbitrary, as Iglu Iglu really isn't like any other tile game I've played. As with many tile-laying games, various tiles have special powers, and you randomly select a tile, it just so happens that you select from the board instead of a bag or a stack. Doing so changes the dynamics of the game board.

Action point systems appear in many German games, Wolfgang Kramer's chief among them (Java, Tikal, Mexica). Iglu Iglu's action-point system is very simple, in that you can only take a couple of different actions, and moving is one of the prime ones; as such it reminds me more of another recent action point system, Dos Rios. Like most action-point systems, Iglu Iglu is highly tactical: you can't look ahead too far.

The majority-control system is a very simple one,with the only notable adds being the facts that there are double-value control tokens in the form of the igloos and that the sizes of the islands change and morph during the game.

With its combination of evolving islands and majority control scoring, Iglu Iglu as a whole reminds me of two other games: Trias, a majority-control dinosaur game, with action points, where islands evolve due to continental drift; and Entdecker, a majority-control explorer games, where islands evolve due to tile placement. Iglu Iglu is lighter and faster than either of the other games, and has more emphasis on another aspect (tactical food hunting).

The Game Design

Overall Iglu Iglu is a very innovative game that works decently well. Here's some of my favorite aspects of the design:

Brilliant Tile Innovations: The innovations for the way the tiles work are brilliant. The idea of taking apart a board, and at the same time revealing special pieces is neat. I also love the drift tiles which let you rearrange the board in interesting ways. It's all very evocative too.

Decent Tactics, Strategy: The tactical decisions in the game are interesting though not amazing. They include what to melt , what to fish, where to move, etc. There's also a bit of good strategy, largely depending on how you're going to plan for the island scoring at the end.

Great Theming: Finally, the theming is very strong.

Here's some game elements I'm neutral on.

High Random Element: As in most random tile-selection games, this one has a lot of randomness. Lucky red tiles or infusions or food can make a big difference for individual players. I'm really not convinced at how strategically you can play the early phases of the game as a result. However, I think the randomness is a good match for the lightness of the theme, mechanics, and game length, so I can't complain about it.

And here's some of the elements I didn't like:

Game Flow Can Be Uneven: Depending on the random draw of those tiles it's entirely possible for the game to sort of fizzle out because enough food didn't show up. I had this happen in one 2-player playtest, where food was almost absent through the second two-thirds of the game. I don't know how common this problem is, but at least sometimes the game can tip in this direction, to its deficit.

Too Many Special Cases: The game also felt like it was too full of special cases (e.g., bears eat other animals while on the move; and you can't build an igloo if someone else is in the space; and igloos can protect from bear attacks). We missed a couple of them in our first play because there were so many.

If I were grading Iglu Iglu solely on the basis of its design, in a vacuum, I'd probably give it a high "3" out of "5" Substance. However I usually rank a game's Substance higher when it's unique, innovative, and thus unlike anything else in my collection. Iglu Iglu qualifies here because of the interesting pseudo-tile-laying design elements which I love here and would love to see used again. As a result I give it a full "4" out of "5" for Substance, well above average.

Conclusion

Iglu Iglu is a largely unique game-design by the Brunos Cathala and Faidutti. Some of the tactics are a bit pedestrian and random, but the tile-removing system which is the core of the game is brilliantly conceived and executed. If you like light, thematic games like _Carcassonne_ and _Ticket to Ride_, I think you'll like this one too, though the simple action-point and majority-control systems do add a little more grist. Unfortunately, it's only available in German at present.