Bag of Bugs
Bag of Bugs is pretty much what it says in the title. It's a bag packed full of wooden bug tokens, plus a couple of other tokens, and it forms a light push-your-luck drafting and set collection game from Horrible Guild. Bag of Bugs is designed by Hjalmar Hach, Andrea Di Lorenzo, Marco Castagna and Lorenzo Silva, and it was one of the novelty games we picked up at this year's Spiel Essen.
The game is designed for 3–5 players who take it in turns to be the player who draws tokens from the bag and the others who are 'grabbers'. They aren't grabbing the tokens directly, however, but they instead grab one of the five numbered markers that indicate the order in which the drawn bugs are selected at the end of the round and the particular combination of bugs that can be taken (eg: one from the largest group). Any bugs left over after all the markers have been activated must either be all taken or all rejected by the player who was the drawer for the round.
The player count determines the maximum number of tokens taken from the bag (6 for a three-player game, 8 for a four-player game and 9 with five players) but the bag also contains rock tokens and if two of those come out then the drawing stops. At that point a grabber who hasn't yet taken a marker will have missed their opportunity for the round.
If this was just a game where the more bugs you took the more you scored then this game would still be fun but the scoring is more subtle and so adds to the tactics and players' push-your-luck decision making. Grubs all score 3 points and there is a bug that scores a negative -1 point but most bug types are worth 1 point for one, 3 points for two and 6 points for three. Go over three of a kind, however, and that bug type scores you zero! Mindful of that, players may deliberately draft their bugs so as to lumber other players with unscoring surpluses. There's some scope for mitigation and/or 'take that' interaction tho' with wind tokens that blow a bug from your tableau to your neighbour's.
Bag of Bugs is intuitively easy to play. It's a family-friendly game and, at around 15 minutes for a game, it works too as a games night filler. We've enjoyed it at all player counts but it's at its best with a full complement of five players.
