As a reviewer, inevitably, someone will ask you what your favourite style of game is. Depending on what I’ve just played when you ask, I may hum and haw but will ultimately tell you abstract strategy games are my jam. Roo may just have taken the top spot as my favourite abstract strategy game. It’s also been one of the harder games to wrap my brain around, but not in a bad way.
Binary Cocoa is a small publisher from a small city in Idaho, that makes as much of their game components as locally as possible, which is a beautiful thing to see. In the case of Roo, the player pieces are standard glass beads, laser etched with each player’s unique logo and the board is printed on a super slim neoprene mat. One of the nice things about that is that if you want to play it outside, camping, on a picnic, whatever, it’s not going blow away and it’s not going to get wrecked.
Normal play is 2, 3, or 4 players, elimination style. Although the rules are being redesigned to include 2v2 team play that mostly just changes the table talk and winner, it’s still elimination format.
To set up each player places four pebbles of their colour in their quadrant of the board. On their turn, the player will jump one or more pieces, ending in an open square. You can jump any piece and any number of pieces in a straight line, with only a few restrictions. You can’t jump into the same square more than once, and you can only jump onto one of the black centre spaces if you have jumped another player’s piece as part of that move. Beyond that, anything goes.
How a move works, is that the player plots out their jumps with black pebbles called Tracers. Your move is not complete until you actually move your piece, however, so it’s an easy way to make sure you are doing what you are planning in your head. After your move, and this is where things get interesting, the black Tracer pebbles are replaced by white Neutral pebbles. These Neutral pebbles can’t be moved but can be jumped as normal, changing the layout of the board drastically with each turn.
An interesting addition to that mechanic is that for every five Tracers placed in a single turn, that player gets a pebble of their own colour that can be placed in any open space on the board, up to a maximum of eight pebbles. If you get to the point where you have eight pebbles and haven’t already won, every five tracers is instead traded for… nothing. Stop being greedy. So, for either case, if you made six jumps, placing six tracers, five of them would automatically convert to a pebble (or nothing) and you would still get a Neutral bead to place as normal.
I was playing a team game when this rule bit my teammate in the tuckus. He made six jumps and got his pebble and one Neutral. Except we really needed those first five Neutral pebbles on the board and it almost cost us the game.
Remember when I mentioned that you can only jump into one of the central black spaces if you’ve first jumped one of your opponent’s pieces? Well, that’s also how you eliminate them from the game. Jump that player’s piece and end on one of the central spaces. If you jump more than one player’s pebbles in that move, yes you eliminate them all. Even your teammate if you’re playing 2v2.
The game sounds simple. Mechanically, it is simple. But understanding how the game plays has a shockingly steep learning curve. After my first game and inevitable loss, a light bulb went on. After my second game and equally inevitable loss, more lights went on. It took a few more games before I really started to see everything. The nice thing is that the games are usually fairly short. But as with any deep abstract strategy game Analysis Paralysis is a thing that can happen. The downside to being an elimination game is if you are out early it’s a wait. BUT you probably still want to pay attention, because you’re going to keep learning.
One of the nice things about Binary Cocoa doing most of the production in-house is that they can do smaller print runs, and if they want to tweak and reprint the rules, they can push that out in their physical game faster than a big publisher. I can’t wait to dig into a few more of their games, but until I can, I’m going to love me some Roo.
You can find Binary Cocoa online at binarycocoa.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/binarycocoa.