Naughty Or Nice Review

Santa only puts people on the naughty list if he has just claus…

On your turn you’ll do one of three actions either, gift a kiddo as mentioned above, craft presents which you can use on subsequent turns to gift or summon a creature! As well as the eight kiddos on show, you’ll also have three face up gift cards, a draw pile of face down gifts and a pile of creature cards. To craft gifts, you take any combination of two cards from either the face up or face down ones available. To summon a creature you take two cards from the creature deck and simply keep your favourite beastie.

But what do the creature cards do?

Creature cards can either be bad for others or good for you – Naughty or nice if you will… do you see what I did there? You can play them at any point during your turn but they must have started the round in your hand, so you may not play a creature you have just summoned. Creatures can also be summoned during play when you successfully collect certain sets of kiddos.

Whether you’ve been naughty or nice the midnight hour is approaching, and when the clock strikes twelve, you’ve run out of time to do any more gifting and the game comes to an end. In the bottom six cards of both the creature and kiddo decks is a midnight card, when either one is revealed each player may take only one more action, apart from summoning a creature and then points are tallied.

Will yule love the game?

Naughty or nice is clearly aimed at a family audience, with its cheerful imagery and simple gameplay, it’s great for anyone to get along with. A great thing is it’s also scalable too, and while to me that normally means to me extra rules, pieces or mechanics to take the game up a notch, this is quite different. This game scales down so players as young as 4 can enjoy playing along. In total five modules are suggested with the fifth level being the full game, and whilst my 8 year old had no trouble with the game, children are all individual, so it’s great to have ways to simplify what’s going on if needed.

Whilst I love the gingerbread scoreboard and some of the lively illustrations, for me they don’t all quite gel together. The kiddos in particular don’t seem to match the rest of the aesthetic and overall it doesn’t feel as slick as it could be looks wise. My kids also thought the game went on just a little too long but this could easily be solved by removing some kiddo cards, in fact the rule book suggests this already for a 2 or 3 player game. Warning for colour blind players, you may struggle as my other half had a really tough time distinguishing what colour gifts the kiddo’s wanted.

We also lost track of whose turn it was a few times while the previous player was deciding what action to take, but this just could’ve been because subsequent players were eager to make their move and jumping in too soon. The other disconcerting thing that all of us, including the kids fell very quickly into saying ‘I’m buying that kid from the playground’ instead of ‘I’m gifting these presents to this kiddo’ which… just… feels… a bit… odd!

Overall naughty or nice is a great family game (buying kids aside) the rule book is really well laid out and as well as telling you how to scale the game down it also has little stories about each gift giver. All the components are great quality and theres even a reference card (love a reference card) for each player to remind them what’s going on. Sure after a while it may become a bit stayed for the adults, but you can just remove some kiddo & creature cards for a slightly quicker game which the kids also seem to want. Very much aimed at kids of a primary school age, I suggest playing with a hot chocolate complete with whipped cream and shmellows! This is a lovely game to play to kick off the festive season.