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The Penguin Ultimatum is a card-laying game by Jim Doherty's Eight Foot Llama.
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
The Penguin Ultimatum comes with:
- 110 cards
- 12 cubes
- 8 stones
- 1 rulebook
Cards: The cards are all medium-weight, glossy, and printed full-color. Artwork by Scott Starkey is attractive and funny; I haven't been a big fan of his rough stylings in other games, but here it seemed to work.
As is common in Eight Foot Llama games, cards are used for a large variety of purposes. The 110 cards include: 4 activity cards (which give each player a bonus); 16 entertainer cards, 64 penguin cards, and 14 curtain cards (which together form the field of play); 8 score cards (which are numbered 0-9 and 00-90 and rather awkwardly allow you to keep score); and 4 rules cards (which remind you of a few important rules). Once you get what's what straight the cards are all pretty easy to use. In particular there's some good color and icon matching among the main card types.
Wood Cubes: Three each in the four player colors (black, blue, brown, red). They're used to mark which penguins you currently control.
Glass Stones: Two each in the player colors. They're decently well matched to the wood bits. These stones are used with those rule cards to keep track of your score.
Rulebook: A four-page rulesheet. It's got some illos and examples which make the game easier to understand.
Overall, The Penguin Ultimatum is clearly an indie game made partly with off-the-shelf components (the wood cubes and stones). Nonetheless the components are generally good quality, the cartoony artwork is, as already noted, attractive, and the game is easy to play. Thus, despite its indie origins, I've let The Penguin Ultimatum eke in a "4" out of "5" for Style. It comes off quite well given its simplistic base.
The Gameplay
The object of The Penguin Ultimatum is to score points by matching up your penguins with entertainers they like.
Setup: The initial play area is setup by placing a curtain card in the middle of the table, then 3-4 entertainers around it (depending on the number of players).
Each player gets a hand of four penguin cards. Each player also randomly takes an activity card which shows a specific type of entertainment, which will be worth bonus points to him at the end of the game.
Entertainers & Penguins. The game centers around the interrelations between entertainers and penguins. Each entertainer has a species (e.g., "sheep") which is marked by a color and a type of entertainment (e.g., unicycling) which is marked by an icon--for a total of 16 different entertainers, one for each combination. Each penguin, meanwhile has a species of entertainer he likes, a type of entertainment he likes, and a value. For example there's a value 5 penguin who likes (green) sheep and juggling. Generally, you'll score points in the game by placing penguins near entertainers who match either the species or the type of entertainment that they like.
Order of Play: On his turn a player:
- Plays a Penguin Card.
- Moves an Invitation Marker.
- Resolves any Entertainment.
- Draws a New Penguin Card.
Play a Penguin: You play a penguin to an empty space in the play area, adjacent to an entertainer (and adjacent in all places in this game includes diagonals). If you play a penguin adjacent to another penguin of the same color then you must pay a "mingling fee" equal to the value of all adjacent penguins of that color. Alternatively you can discard an entertainer card that you've earned to avoid paying this fee.
Move an Invitation: Next you may take one of your control markers and put it on a penguin who doesn't already have one. For the first three turns, you'll just be getting these "invitations" onto the board. After that you'll often be moving a control marker to the penguin you just placed, but that's not required. You can leave things as they are or even grab a penguin that someone else recently played (but didn't take control of).
Resolve Entertainment: Each entertainer has pips ("trigger dots") on up to eight of its side (the edges and corners). When there are cards next to all of these pips, the entertainer begins to entertain. Every adjacent penguin earns its controller points if he matches the color of the entertainer or if he likes that sort of entertainment. The points earned are equal to the value of the penguin.
Afterward the entertainer is given to the player who caused the entertainment to occur through his card placement. The entertainer can be used later to pay a mingling fee or to earn points at the end of the game. A curtain card is put in the entertainer's place to mark that the space on the board is already full. Then the active player gets to place a new entertainer.
Draw a New Penguin Card: The turn ends with the player replacing his penguin card so he again has a hand of four.
Ending the Game Ends: The game ends when a player can't draw a penguin, entertainer, or curtain from the appropriate deck. Most of the games points will have already been scored through entertainment. However there are a few bonuses based on entertainers that players have collected:
- Each player gets 2 points for each entertainer he has who's activity matches his activity card (e.g., "all jugglers").
- Whichever player has the most of each color/species of entertainer gets 5 points, with ties being worth 3 to each player.
Relationships to Other Games
The Penguin Ultimatum is a card-laying game that has similarities to traditional tile-laying games like classic Carcassonne. However, it's a much more logistical game, with specific attention paid to valuations and points earned for each individual play--as a result it can end up being a lot less casual than Carcassonne.
There's also a tiny bit of majority control with those 5-point bonuses for penguins at the end, but it's not that crucial a part of the game, and it's also a bit hard to control.
The Penguin Ultimatum is one of four games put out by Eight Foot Llama, which all seem to feature humorous theming and European mechanics that are developed in some unusual manners (making them unique, but also a bit more awkward in some cases).
The Game Design
The Penguin Ultimatum is overall a clever game. It's mainly tactical, but there's lots of interesting tactics, including figuring out how to fill up an entertainer's trigger dots, arranging for an entertainer to finish on your turn, and playing penguins to best advantage.
The control/invitation mechanism is quite unique since you have to decide which of a limited number of resources to hold on to. There was less going back to old penguins (or penguins that an opponent abandoned) than I expected, but the possibility was always there.
Overall the game played well and had interesting choices on every turn. I thought it was a tiny bit long for its relatively light gameplay, but not grossly so. I've thus given it a high "3" out of "5" for Substance: slightly above average.
Conclusion
The Penguin Ultimatum is a unique card-laying game by Eight Foot Llama. It's got some fun theming and some light Eurogame mechanics. The result is fun and worth playing, though not tremendously deep.
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