Snow Tails
Nothing beats the summer heat like a little time spent at the Arctic Circle. If “staycations” are keeping you from making the journey, get into a frigid state of mind with a themed game like Asmodee’s Snow Tails. Players join in a dogsled race along an icy trail, playing cards to change their direction and speed as they go. Damage is to be expected, but it limits one’s movement options. When someone reaches the finish line, the sled furthest forward wins the game.
A lot of games claim to have new movement systems, and this is no exception. While it may not be cut from whole cloth, it’s certainly effective and spurs one to think. You have to consider not just this move but the one after that (and if you can think even farther, more momentum to you). Positions on the board can change at the drop of a hat, allowing even someone pulling up the rear to grab victory if he (literally) plays his cards right. It’s not enough for a game to promise an exciting contest, it has to follow through, and fortunately Snow Tails does both.
The object of the game is to be first and foremost at the finish line.
Each player gets a colored wooden sled, plus a play mat and small set of cards (called the Dog Deck) to match. Three to five racers line up at the starting position and pull onto the icy path. Movement is determined by the cards played. A racer pulls only from his own deck, with cards numbered 1 through 5, and uses these to alter his course each turn. A sled mat has two dogs at the front and a brake at the back, all preprinted with a 3. The dogs are combined and the brake subtracted from their total, so to begin with all vehicles are traveling three spaces (3 + 3 – 3), straight ahead. If the dogs accumulate cards with different numbers, they’re still added to get the speed but the stronger dog makes the sled drift. If the left dog’s position gets a 4 played on it, for example, the dog now goes (4 + 3 – 3) four spaces forward, but has to drift one lane left during the turn. Multiple cards can be played together during a turn, but they must all be the same numeral – so it could be a single card, or a pair of them (two 3s, two 4s), or even three if the racer is willing to change both dogs and the brake to the same number.
Creative use of cards is necessary (and nerve-wracking) to navigate the trail. There are a variable number of lanes open for use depending on where on the track the teams find themselves. Going into a curve on the outside, for example, offers the most space before crashing into a snow bank, but it also means the sled has to pull closer to the inside of the curve somewhere during its move. Taking tighter curves doesn’t let the dogs accelerate as much, and folks tend to bunch up there since it’s the safest way to avoid a wall of ice. Red lines along curves also show where the danger zones are – cross these warnings too fast and your craft suffers damage. Oh, and since your competition is there as well, running into them may do damage as well. For every collision, a Dent card is added to one’s hand. These offending items prevent one from drawing a full hand of useful cards. Fewer number cards to fool with means fewer movement options at a critical moment – and they all feel like critical moments.
As soon as someone hits the finish line, it’s the last turn of the game. That person doesn’t necessarily win, though: the competitor who ends his movement the furthest along the track on that last turn is the winner.
Snow Tails offers a decent mix of components. The sled mats are good and thick, though regrettably the new American version lacks the best feature from the European copies. It’s a pivot, a little peg the player can hold down to rotate the entire craft around that point. It kept cards from sliding around while permitting the user to point the sled in any direction. It made it easier to figure out what cards have to go where, and the player didn’t have to get out of his seat and crane his neck looking at the board at severe angles to remember which way is left or right (this method also spilled a lot less Mountain Dew). The cards are sadly smaller now (though that’s a space saver in a game that eats up tabletop real estate), but the brake is better. Time was the cards were placed in a separate stack for the brake and the Dog Deck cards were played directly on the huskies – a little cutout slid up and down a printed brake scale and was handily dislodged by a sneeze. Here they’ve sliced out a hole in the back of the play mat, and interchangeable brake numbers are slipped into the slot. The board comes in segments so it can be configured a number of ways, and flipping the pieces over offers additional challenges like a one-lane bottleneck and spaces that contain fir trees, the better to run into full tilt with. (They even provide adorable little wooden pines to place in the way.) For a $49.99 price tag, it’s a nifty setup.
It’s good to see a race game that, even when locking players into a path, knows how to offer them enough rope. If they hang themselves and blow the race, it won’t be for a lack of slack. Last-minute saves, clever strategies, wise card selection, and the tense, crowded angling for position that comes with trying to hit the sweet spot in the curve ahead of one’s fellows keep the tension high and the mind working overtime. The arrangement of using one to three cards seems to achieve the perfect balance between choices and limitations, forcing everyone to dither and sweat as they look for the play they need that’s going to take them right where they need to go (or at least prevent them from running into a gulley for one more turn). With Snow Tails standing as a good pastime regardless of the season, it’s time to “mush” to the game store.