Twinkle Twinkle
- Board's Eye View
- 12 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Twinkle Twinkle is a shining example of a drafting and tableau-building game from Allplay and Levity Game Studios. It takes 1-4 players and it's designed by Ammon Anderson, with attractive night sky art by Natalie Dombois.
The mechanics of the game will be familiar to anyone who has played Kingdomino (Blue Orange) or any of its sequels, prequels or imitators: the drafting choice you make also determines turn order in the next round, and you can see what tiles will be available in that round. That means that if you are eager to nab a particular tile in the next round, you may well choose a less-than-optimal tile in this round that's at the start of the tile row and so will give you first dibs in the next round.
As you will guess from this game's title, the tiles all show stars and other celestial objects. When you draft a tile you place it on your individual player board in a 5 x 4 square grid. There they will score for constellations (chains of stars connected by dotted lines) and according to the set collection rules for each type of other celestial object. It's simple enough to understand and satisfying to successfully build the adjacency links needed to maximise your scoring, making Twinkle Twinkle an enjoyable light filler-length game for experienced gamers and a great choice as a 'gateway' game to introduce to those coming new to modern board games.
There are alternative ('advanced') scoring conditions for each celestial object, and you can mix & match the 'standard' and 'advanced' sides of each object's scoring cards, adding to the game's replayability. You can add even more with the How I Wonder expansion, which introduces five further celestial objects, each with their own 'standard' and 'advanced' scoring options. The idea is that you select the five celestial objects to use in the game from among the 10 different objects you'll have when you add How I Wonder to the core game.
The production quality from Allplay/Levity Game Studio adds hugely to this game's appeal. Whether you play with just Twinkle Twinkle or combine it with Twinkle Twinkle: How I Wonder, you'll find players immediately attracted by the acrylic tiles. These can be oriented so they can be positioned to optimise their scoring and, because they are entirely transparent, they can be inverted - giving you a choice of up to eight potential orientations when you place them in your tableau. Happily, we haven't found this giving rise to excessive AP (Analysis Paralysis) because, with a see-through tile, you can usually determine quite quickly the optimal orientation.
