Holiday Fever is a game I’ve been waiting a year to get on the table for review. My friends over at The Cardboard Kid had arranged a copy for me, and I was obviously ecstatic. But alas, when I opened it I discovered that the copy had been water damaged. I reached out and discovered that a massive amount of their stock had been destroyed in the warehouse. With no stock to sell, I made the decision to hold back and review the game this year instead. So now, with sales a selling, we can finally present Holiday Fever: A Family Tradition.
At first glance, Holiday Fever may look like any other roll-and-move game, but there is a surprising amount more in it. Not a ton more, just to be clear, but enough more to make this a game better suited to families than just kids. A not-unreasonable description might be what you’d get if Monopoly was a party game.
The similarities are inescapable. Roll two dice and move around the board. if you land on your opponent’s business you pay them $200 but if you land on your own you get $200, which is nice. Other spaces often add debts or deposits to your score sheet. Naughty or Nice spaces have you draw a card and follow the directions. If you land on a Store space you can choose to purchase an item or combination of items at the listed price. This is usually a Gift and Value Card combination, a Value Card alone, a Christmas Light, or an Ornament.
Gifts are one of the things you need to win the game, which makes them somewhat important. Gifts on their own are nothing. They need at least one value card under it, so you probably want to buy those in tandem. Value cards on their own can be added to other gifts, so you can get those on their own. Since Lights and Ornaments are a second path to a possible win, this seems like a good place to look at the score sheet.
There are three main areas to the score sheet. There is a column to add the debts you accumulate over the game and a column for deposits you make. There are Charitable Donation spaces on the board that allows you to add $50 to your debts, and fill in a star next to the topmost debt in the column (that doesn’t already have a star). Debts with a star are forgiven at the end of the game. When Christmas arrives and the game ends, players add up their unforgiven debts and total deposits, with the difference of two being that player’s final score. The third area on the score sheet is a space to sketch out an undecorated Christmas tree. When you land on a Shop space, you have the option to purchase Lights or Ornaments then you’ll draw these onto your tree to decorate it. At the end of the game, these ornaments are worth a $100 deposit each.
However, you can’t decorate indefinitely. Once you have three lights and three ornaments your pawn is removed from the outer track (representing the City of Eastern Star) and onto the December calendar in the middle of the board. This begins the second phase of the game for that player. Once a player is on the December calendar they still roll dice and do what the space says. (But only one die after Dec 12.) Some spaces ask you to draw a Snowflake card, that operates similarly to Naughty & Nice but only impacts the calendar area. There is a second way to get to the December calendar, and it changes the game even more. If all of the Gift or Value cards are gone, all players move to December and begin a final Race to Christmas. Players no longer resolve the instructions on the spaces they land on, just rolling and moving. If a player was already on the Calendar, they continue from where they were, but also no longer pay attention to what the spaces say.
The first player to land EXACTLY on Christmas adds $500 to their deposits and if their tree is decorated with 3 lights and 3 ornaments their debts are also forgiven. Yes, all of them. This little Christmas Bonus gives that player a significant leg up in the scoring but not necessarily to the point of rendering the rest of the game irrelevant.
Now, all of what I’ve said so far distills down the most significant mechanics of the game, but it only matches up to part of the description I gave at the start. Where’s “the party game” part? Well, that element isn’t a specifically mechanical one, which is why I’ve left it for last. No holiday pun intended here, but one of the Hallmarks of most party games is that they require a special sort of buy in by the players. In most games, you sit down and play, but you don’t need to get particularly invested in it. A good party game asks you to accept the ridiculous and raucous as the norm. Most people have to step outside their own box, and for some outside their comfort zone, and celebrate being be an extrovert even if you aren’t one. Almost every space or card that gives you a bonus in Holiday Fever asks for players to give a short speech about something good or to sing a song. In fact, the game is supposed to end with everyone joining together in a Christmas sing-along. That is how the party gets started.
At worst, Holiday Fever is a good game for families with young-ish kids. But with the right group, it’s a holiday party in a box, just waiting to burst out. The full name of the game is Holiday Fever: A Family Tradition. This time of year it’s even more important to remember that family isn’t about blood, but about love. So, regardless of the family you may choose to play this with, it honestly could live up to its name and become a Family Tradition.
You can find Holiday Fever online at holidayfevergame.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/HolidayFeverGame.
Don’t forget you can read all of our current and past holiday reviews at TheRatHole.ca/Christmas!
The tradition here, for our Rat Hole Family, is to ends each holiday review with some extra cheer, in the form of a song. Today’s song is performed by Canadian music legends Natalie MacMaster and Glass Tiger, covering a song by the even more legendary Gordon Lightfoot. This is Song for a Winter’s Night.