Christmas. Hanukkah. Kwanzaa. Festivus. Dongzhi. Yule. Winter Solstice. Krampusnacht & St. Nicholas Day. The list of winter celebrations in the Northern Hemisphere goes on for WAY longer than I’m willing to go on for here. However, in North America at least, the tabletop landscape rarely reflects that same diversity. Since TheRatHole.ca’s opening, our holiday review series has featured around 85-90% Christmas games, with the remaining 10-15% including more fictional winter holidays than real-world ones. It’s something we want to change, and today we want to celebrate the season and those festivities we may never have a chance to cover. Today we finish our 2023 holiday review series by simply celebrating Winter.
Winter is the first release in Devir’s 4 Seasons game series. It’s a unique abstract strategy game, and if you’re new around here you should know that I love abstract strategy games. A single game of Winter only takes about 10 minutes, the box will fit in most coat pockets, and you could probably fit the final 18-card tableau on those tiny Starbucks tables. It’s near perfect in so many ways.
The game plays in two, thematic, phases.
In the Freezing Phase, players may choose one of two actions: turn over one of the 18 cards in the deck, and play it with at least one of its four snowflake symbols adjacent to at least one of the four snowflakes on another card, OR place one of their counters inside a square of four snowflakes matching their colour (light blue or dark blue). This continues until all 18 cards have been placed.
Then, in the Thawing Phase, players have three actions to choose from. First, they may move one card to another position AND place at least one counter of their colour. If moving a card creates more than one square of their coloured snowflakes, that player places a counter in each square. Second, a player may remove one card in the tableau from the game. If that disrupts any squares with counters on them, those counters are returned to their respective owners (and they may be placed again later). Finally, the player may choose to remove one of their own counters from the tableau.
That last option is a bit risky and highly strategic since the game ends when the last of either player’s counters leaves the tableau and the end of the game can come more suddenly than might be expected. If moving a card splits up the tableau, the disconnected segment with the least number of cards is removed from the game along with any counters on those cards. With that end game in mind, it becomes evident that most strategies should see players spreading their counters out across the tableau. Removing one’s own counter from play leaves that player open to a loss, however, it simultaneously ensures that the counter may be placed again whereas counters lost to a separated tableau are lost for good.
For such a small and speedy game, the strategy is shockingly deep. I’d like to think that I’m pretty decent at this style of game, but even the smallest unnoticed mistake can lead to your downfall. I absolutely love that.
Coming back around to other holidays, an interesting shift in winter traditions came about in Iceland. The internet has made Jólabókaflóð (literally the Christmas book flood) a worldwide phenomenon among bookworms. The giving of books is a wonderful tradition, but interestingly it only dates back to the wartime years of the 1940s. It was only a few years before this, as radio became an increasingly common form of entertainment, that the tradition of Kvöldvaka (the evening wake) began to decline. Kvöldvaka was a way for families to keep themselves healthy and happy through the long nights of the winter season. This included, in part, the playing of games. So whether you are looking for the perfect stocking stuffer, or looking to bring back an old tradition such as Kvöldvaka, Winter is a terrific option!
You can find Devir Games online at devirgames.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/devirgames.
Don’t forget you can read all of our current and past holiday reviews at TheRatHole.ca/Christmas!
So finishing this year’s holiday review series with a game that isn’t precisely holiday-themed, I wanted to leave you with not-precisely a holiday song. Like many, I adore the Pentatonix acapella version of White Winter Hymnal, but the claymation video for Fleeting Foxes original song is too good not to share. Plus it’s a good time of year to remind ourselves where things came from and focus less on the shiny new Elmo doll.