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Games To Celebrate Hedgehog Day!

HEDGEHOG DAY

Sweet but spikey. Like many of my favourite games, hedgehogs are sneaky creatures who draw you in with their cuteness before pricking you for the cheek of coming too close. And they have a day to themselves on 2 February - Hedgehog Day! Intended to raise awareness of their role in our ecosystems (and how to protect them), it’s a perfect excuse to get some slyly salty games to the table this month. So here are 5 recommendations for when you are feeling sharp!

Tiny Towns

TINY TOWNS

Have you ever noticed the forest creatures on the Tiny Towns box? Until now I don’t think I have, but one of the hardworking inhabitants is an apple harvesting hedgehog! And that little fellow has picked the best place to work, rest, and play. Tiny Towns is an excellent, pattern matching, abstract strategy game for 1-6 players that takes around 45 mins.

In the game you will be selecting resource cubes to enable you to build buildings in your town. Each construction requires cubes to be placed in a specific pattern, and once complete you will remove them and replace one with the building token. You only have a grid of 4 x 4 spaces and so space becomes tighter and tighter as the game progresses. VPs are based on the number and types of building tokens you have in your town by the end of the game. It’s a brilliant puzzle with a super smooth solo mode. And, just like a wee hog balling up, its prickly nature is deeply felt when you realise you haven’t planned your development very well!

Everdell

The quintessential creature game, Everdell is the perennial darling of open drafting, tableau building, hand management, worker placement games. It is as clever as it is charming (very!) and is super easy to learn. For 1 – 4 players, the skill comes in learning how to maximise the resource and card bonuses that each spot offers.

On your turn you can only take one action: place a worker on a spot in the board that will unlock resources, cards, or other bonuses; play a card (construction or critter – hey there Dr Hedgehog!) to your own city by paying the resource cost; or pass and prepare for the next season which may allow you to trigger a special bonus and add more workers to your creature crew!

The key is trying to get enough resources to build the constructions and critters that will work together best to produce stuff for you – with some cards paying out in specific seasons, there is also an element of light engine building. Cards you build have a VP value but may also provide VP generating possibilities at end game. There are also specific public objectives based on building specific combinations of buildings during the game. Playtime in Everdell when all players have added the 15th card to their tableau, and the winner is the Mayor with the most

VPs! With the most famous tree in board gaming (sorry, Enid Blighton!), this game is super cute and super clever.

Animal Upon Animal

Okay so hedgehogs aren’t designed to be stacked. The roundness, the prickliness, the fact that they don’t like heights. Nothing about hedgehogs screams gymnastic but that hasn’t stopped HABA Games!

Animal Upon Animal is a sweetly simple dexterity game with wonderful wooden meeples who are desperate to become a pyramid. Every turn, each player rolls a dice and then either tries to place 1 or 2 of their own set of creatures to the emerging pyramid, passes an animal to another player to place, or helps Mr Croc take the weight by using one of their animals to extend the base. If any animals drop, the player receives them back, and the winner is the player who places all of their animals first.

Savernake Forest

Winter is a freezy fear for all the animals in Savernake Forest! From Devir Games for 2-4 players, Savernake Forest is lovely open drafting, tableau building game. In the game, each player is trying to create their own network of paths that the woodland critters can follow to gather food. But each of the 23 different animals in the forest (including the hard-to-please hedgehog!) have specific foods they really want to store. And, just like me and Joey Tribiani, they don’t share food. So paths in your 4 x 4 grid must not intersect.

Each turn you pick one card from the market of path cards and an animal card. Upon picking a card, you’ll also trigger an instant bonus. After 16 rounds, each player will have built their tableau of 4 x 4 (or 8 x 3 in advanced 2P mode),and then it’s time to tot up the points and see who is the most winter ready of them all! It’s a lovely game that has an excellent extended two-player mode. The key is managing the number of animals and path cards – you need both and usually at precisely the same time. Prickly picking indeed!

Meadow

Set collection never looked so lovely – even the spikey hedgehogs have a soft, cutesy side in Meadow! Another beautiful open drafting, hand management, tableau building worker placement game, in Meadow 1-4 players are explorers competing to observe species, landscapes, and other noteworthy discoveries.

Slightly weightier and more in depth than Everdell, Meadow is all about the symbols the cards you are collecting display. And as you add cards and cover up existing cards, your abilities for the remainder of the game change. The paths offer plenty of spots for your workers to activate, but how you have been managing your tableau and cards will determine how useful those spots are and will become. And the boon that comes from jubby secondary actions cannot be minimised. Meadow looks sweet, plays strategic, and will certainly have you coming back for more!

We hope these game suggestions prickle your interest and help you on your way as we say hurrah for all the hedgehogs around the world!