This time three games that fit in a backpack and on a folding table. Hidden Leaders is a tug of war with cards. Players slide two pawns back and forth on a simple scoring track by playing hero cards. Those pawns represent warring factions in an empire. The crux is that each player secretly supports a different faction. If you support the Hill Tribes, you want the green pawn to be ahead. Whoever takes on the Imperial army wants red to finish first. The Watervolk strives for balance and wants the pawns in the game to be next to each other. The Undead just want war, and try to get both pawns to finish high.
Smart is that every player two factions. The support for one faction is often clear. But that second faction often remains a surprise. So you never know exactly who your direct competitors are at the table and where you might be able to forge a alliance. Here the following applies: the more rope pulls, the more fun. The hero cards illustrated by Satoshi Matsuura are beautiful. They depict the heroes of the four factions with wacky heads and funny Suske-en-Wiske names. At home we had to laugh out loud at the Listless Leader, Foul Apparition and the Sorrowful Druid.
card game King Fridge requires a good memory and fast reflexes. Players manage a refrigerator containing four closed food cards with different values. The goal is to get as low as possible at the end of the game. New dish cards you draw can be exchanged for what’s already in your fridge – but without looking again. And opponents who think they have the same dish in their fridge can also discard that card from their own fridge. King Fridge quickly derails into a hectic ball game: who had that attractive fruit with a value of -2? And what was in your own cool compartment again? Argh!
Click! The Great Wall is a card game where players build new pieces of the Great Wall of China to stage a perfect picture. It’s beautiful to see the wall grow and wonderfully frustrating how a photo can be ruined by opponents sliding back pieces of wall. But the gameplay is erratic. If the game starts with three simple photo assignments, a game of Click! be ready in five minutes. If you start with five difficult ones, a game can just take half an hour. That’s too long for this sweetly illustrated game.