Swapple

With floral illustrations from the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), Swapple is an attractive family and children's game from Gibsons. It's designed by Serena Fadlun and April Mitchell and it takes 3-8 players.

On your turn, you're drawing and/or swapping cards in your eight-card row to manipulate it so that the cards exactly match those on your goal card and are in the same order as the flowers depicted. The cards at either end of your row show pollinators (bees and butterflies) and these also need to be facing in the right direction so that the flowers are pollinated.

Players each have one single-use caterpillar swipe card. This lets you swap a card with one in another player's tableau. You may also find you draw a snail swap card; this can really shake things up because it lets you force a swap of goal cards with another player. Without these 'take that' interactions, Swapple would be a very genteel set collection and tableau building game but the snail swap cards, in particular, inject an element of deliberate chaos into the game, especially when played against a player who looks like they are only a card move or two away from winning.

Of course, it's likely that a snail swap will set you back too, since the goal card you snatch will mean you too will need to refocus your set collection and row ordering. In our plays at Board's Eye View we found that the use of a snail swap card could easily result in handing the win to a player unaffected by the swap. For that reason, players forced to swap goal cards are likely to want to subject all the other players to the same disadvantage. The deck holds 12 snail swap cards, so the chances of drawing one are quite high (1 in 6 in a three-player game, and only 1 in 3 if you take the player count up to eight!).

Even with the goal-snatching effect of enforced snail swaps, most of our games ran to a filler-length 20 minutes or so, so Swapple is unlikely to overstay its welcome. And the colourful gardening theme adds to the game's family-friendly appeal.

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