Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 30 minutes

The Components

Mother Sheep comes with some interesting bits:

Sheep Tiles: These are 11 oval-shaped cardboard tiles: one large one for Mother Sheep and ten small ones for her ten children. Each is labeled with the sheep’s name, and they’re all printed on glossy cardboard.

Pen: Another bit of glossy cardboard. This rectangular piece has spaces to place the ten sheep as they’re taken off the board.

Sheeples: Each of the ten baby sheeps also comes with a miniature plastic sheep piece, which are entirely adorable.

Fences: The game centers around fences, which are popsicle-stick shaped pieces each painted with two or more colors on the front. They’ll be used to pen in the sheep. Though these pieces are required for the gameplay of Mother Sheep they’re the one bit which knocked me out of the game … because they look nothing like fences but rather appear as exactly what they are: multicolored popsicle sticks.

Bag: A cyan cloth bag from which you draw sticks.

Cards: A set of 18 cards, all printed on glossy cardstock. Each lists five different sheep.

Overall the components for Mother Sheep are high quality and the sheep themselves are entirely neat. I’ve given them a “4” out of “5” for Style, with my only real complaint being the gaudy fences.

The Gameplay

The object of Mother Sheep is to fence in your own five sheep.

Setup: The ten sheep are randomly arrayed around the Mother Sheep. Each player takes a card with a list of five sheep on it; this is his secret goal. Each player also takes a set of three fences which he keeps face down; this is his personal supply of fences. A set of three community fences is turned face up.

Fenceplay: On his turn a player must play one of the community fences and may play one of his personal fences (however if he does the latter, it’s not replaced; three is all you get personally for the game).

Each of those fences has two, three, or four colors on it, and these regulate their play. A fence must be played so that it fully overlaps another fence, with the same color touching the same color—and with no other fence already on the segment of fence that the new fence was placed upon. Fences may also be played on the Mother Sheep. She effectively acts as a fence segment of all colors that may be used multiple times.

There’s one other restriction: fence segments cannot be played to make it “impossible” to fence in a sheep. This can happen primarily due to all the segments of fences surrounding a sheep being used, but it’s pretty hard to see, and I’m not convinced that it’s entirely deterministic. And, if you later find out that a sheep is impossible to close, then you have to very inelegantly rearrange fences until it is.

Winning the Game: The game ends at the end of the round where someone has all five of their sheep fenced in; if multiple people reach this condition at the same time, the active player wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Mother Sheep is a largely original game. You could surely find other games that involve fencing things in, but this is a very rare game that does so in a total freeform way (though that freeform nature is the game’s big flaw, as I’ll return to). The only game that I’ve seen that is anything like Mother Sheep is Dragon Delta, which similarly contains freeform placement of sticks, but does so in a somewhat more controlled manner.

The Game Design

To start off with Mother Sheep is an original, innovative game that gets a lot of kudos for really exploring gameplay that goes outside of the norm. I think it might work OK for kids and families, who are doubtless the target audience.

However in a more competitive environment, I feel like the gameplay of Mother Sheep largely falls apart. There’s just too much opportunity to easily mess up other players, and the fact that multiple people are going for parts of the same goals doesn’t offset that enough. The rules for “impossible” sheep try to address this, but they just highlight the problem. The whole time we were playing it felt like the game was teetering on the edge of unplayability; if anyone had been any meaner, I think it’s entirely possible that the game would have floundered.

Thus I can only give Mother Sheep a “2” out of “5” for Substance, and I can’t recommend it for serious play. However, for more casual gameplay I think it might work well enough, and it could be pretty enjoyable in that environment.

Conclusion

Although featuring innovative and interesting play, Mother Sheep has the possibility to quickly crumple under competitive play, and thus works well only for families and casual players.