With its nursery rhyme theme you'd be forgiven for dismissing Plaid Hat's Hickory Dickory as a children's game. That would be a mistake. Tho' there are indeed mice running up and down the clock (tho' not in this case when the clock strikes One) Hickory Dickory is actually a medium-weight eurostyle game that's very much for grown-up gamers.
Hickory Dickory is a worker placement, pick-up-and-deliver, set collection game that uses the clock face as a rondel. The 2-4 players each have a cadre of four mice meeples who move between locations on the clock face by scampering on and off the clock's minute hand as it moves over the five rounds of the game, with each round notionally representing an hour between 7pm and midnight. Each of your four mice has a special characteristic and capacity on its board for the number of tokens it can carry. Most points in the game are earned by collecting tokens and scoring for sets of matching icons and colours. Deliver tokens to the particular locations on the clockface and you can place them out on your individual board to score additional points for bingo rows and columns.
The worker placement action at some locations on the clockface is to run up the pendulum of the clock. Reach the top to score but also to shorten the counterweight so that the next mouse to complete their pendulum run will score fewer points.
Sawyer West has designed Hickory Dickory as a highly interactive game. The minute hand has only limited capacity (adjusted to take account of the number of players) and if a mouse jumps onto the hand when it's full, one of the mice will be ejected. This can frustrate your pick-up-and-deliver plans so it pays to think a few minutes of the clock ahead...
There's a lot to like about Hickory Dickory and, with its imposing central clock and Sonja Muller's art, this is a game that certainly has a great table presence. It's a strategy game where players mostly have open information (for example, of all the plastic tokens drawn from the bag) that lets them plan ahead but there's a random element each 'hour' that involves rolling a 10-sided die and placing a cat's paw token over the clock positions of the two numbers rolled, taking those two clockface locations out of commission for the round. This can be quite punishing, especially if, for example, the 6 o'clock delivery position is taken out of action. If, like us, you find this random element annoying, ignore it. It doesn't feel integral to the game so you can play Hickory Dickory leaving the cat's paws out of it.
Oh, and tho' the game is played over a notional 'five hour' rotation of the clock, it doesn't take anything like that length of time to play. You can expect to finish a two-player game in an hour and, even with four players, our plays at Board's Eye View have all been comfortably less than two hours.