Pete's Plaice
- Board's Eye View
- May 27
- 2 min read
The first thing that strikes you about Pete's Plaice from Ludus Vulpes is the very distinctive collage box art from Kate Davies. It immediately sets the slightly tongue-in-cheek tone for this light but unashamedly 'take that' set collection card game by Kirsty Buley and Phil Fox.
The premise of Pete's Plaice is that the 2-5 players are running a seaside fish restaurant. There are six different varieties of food card and players score by assembling meals that combine various of these. You'll only earn 1 point for a single item meal (a bag of chips, for example) but a two-item meal will net you 3 points, three items will give you 6 points, and that rises to a whopping 30 points if you can manage to assemble a meal that uses all six items. Some items tho' are rarer than others; for example, there are only four curry sauce cards in the deck. Also, you can't add to a meal once you've 'served' it. And hand sizes are limited to six cards so you could only score a 30-point six-item meal if you happened to have the six different food items in your hand all at the same time.
That then's the set collection and scoring but the saveloy of the game is in the 'take that' interaction. The deck doesn't just include food cards. It also includes various action cards. Seagulls steal food. Play one and it forces the next player to discard food cards equal to the number of seagulls on the card (1-4). If you don't have enough food cards in hand, then the seagull snatches an item from one of your served meals - reducing its scoring value. There are various cards that be played to ward off seagulls; for example, a dog scares the seagull away (cancels the card) and a parasol moves the seagull on so it targets the next player. This, and the various other effects, gives rise to much creative mayhem. And tho' players are essentially attacking each other, this is a game that remains family friendly and good-natured throughout.
Luck inevitably plays its part over the cards you draw but there's often a judgement call to make over when it's best to play particular cards. The six-card hand limit means you can't just hoard cards but it can be prudent, for example, to eschew playing a parasol against a solitary seagull and instead hold onto that parasol so that you have it for when a four-seagull swarm heads your way. We had some particularly memorable plays at Board's Eye View where a succession of parasols meant a player's swarm of seagulls ended up gobbling food off their own plate!
The rules incorporate several optional variants. You can, for example, require all a player's meals to be unique (ie: you don't score for meals that are duplicated), and a 'double your luck' variant introduces special rules for playing two copies of the same card. That's worth a go but, tho' Ludus Vulpes include a handy reference card detailing all the effects, it's likely to mean younger players having to look up individual extra effects and that can slow the pace of an otherwise jauntily brisk 20-minute game.
