Ducks in a Row
- Board's Eye View
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Designers Kirsty Buley and Phil Fox, and publishers Ludus Vulpes, have a penchant for flora- and fauna-themed games so we weren't at all surprised to see them come up with a duck-themed game. Ducks in a Row has cute drawings of ducks and you are indeed placing them in a row but this is a card game about getting the balance right about where to play your cards.
The game is played with a deck of 72 cards in six suits, with each suit numbered 1-12. If you are playing with five or six players you use all the cards but you take out one of the suits for a three- or four-player game and you play with only four suits in a two-player game. There's a 'pond' set up in the centre of the table and that has a card representing each of the duck suits in play; each is numbered 13.
Players all have a starting hand of eight cards and a 'pond or row' location selection card in front of them. They also each have a duck house. The notion of a 'duck house' will be alien to many players but it will be familiar to players in the UK because there was a famous political scandal a few years back when a Member of Parliament was found to have claimed the building of a duck house on his parliamentary expenses. Each turn, players place a card from their hand face down on the location selection card so it's clear whether the card is being placed in the player's individual row or in the shared pond, and the cards are then revealed simultaneously.
Cards played in the pond go to the corresponding suit and must be in descending order. Those played to your row must be in ascending order. In either case, you can skip numbers. That means that if you place a #6 mallard card on the mallard in the pond you are effectively excluding mallard cards with a higher number from being played to the pond. If two or more players simultaneously reveal cards of the same suit to be played to the pond, it'll be the lower number that goes to the pond; the player with the higher numbered card has to place it instead in their duck house where it will score negative points. Likewise, on subsequent turns, cards that cannot be legally placed go to their owner's duck house.
At the end of the round, when players have all emptied their hands, players score for each suit by multiplying the number of cards of that suit in their row by the number of that suit's cards in the pond. The same pond multiplier is applied to work out how many points are deducted for cards in a duck house.
Of itself, this would make for an interesting game of bluff, deduction, second-guessing and push-your-luck, but there's more... Whenever you play a card to your row you have the option of activating the special power for that suit. These powers vary from drawing an extra card (which can be a mixed blessing if it's towards the end of the hand), randomly swapping two cards with an opponent, adding a card from any opponent's duck house to your hand, rehoming a card from your duck house to either your row or the pond (slotting it into the correct sequence), and removing a duck from the pond. One of the suits comes with a mini-deck of additional 'persuasion' cards showing a positive or negative 1-3 value. If you play a card to your row from that suit, you get to draw one of these 'persuasion' cards, look at it and then place it face down against one of the suits. At the end of the round these persuasion cards modify the pond value for the suits on which they've been played.
In the Board's Eye View team's first plays of Ducks in a Row some of the special powers felt random but the more we played the more we got our metaphorical ducks in a row and the more fun we had in using the powers to manipulate the pond and the scoring, even in one case managing to turn cards banished to the duck house to positive points by using persuasion cards to tank a suit to make it negative!
Ludus Vulpes are bringing Ducks in a Row to Kickstarter. We'll endeavour to add a link to the campaign when it goes live.
