Trick Shot is a tense, tactical, fast-paced game of ice hockey with cool plastic miniatures and a streamlined rule-set. The game strikes a fine balance between luck and strategy, while still being easy to explain and get to the table. Use smart positioning, special abilities of your skaters, and press your luck to outplay your opponent and score the most goals. Whether you are a hardcore hockey fan or a board-gamer looking for a challenging tactical skirmish, we’ve got you covered!
Trick Shot is played over three periods, each period consisting of 10 turns. Whoever scores the most goals by the end of the third period wins.
On your turn, you may keep activating skaters, as long as the same skater is not activated twice in a row or a turnover is triggered by failing a dice roll. However, after each activation, a die is added to your pool, making each following activation more difficult.
Rolling a Reaction result lets your opponent perform a short move with one of their skaters, limiting the downtime to a minimum.
Double fail results in a penalty and gets your skater off the ice and may cost you control of the puck.
Stamina tokens can be used to mitigate luck by re-rolling failed activations.
-description from designer
- Highly thematic and close to the feel of real hockey in a board game
- Strong sense of push-your-luck tension that can be exciting and humorous
- Three play modes (quick, regular, arcade) offer flexibility for different players
- Clear asymmetry adds depth and variety between matches
- Rules can be confusing for non-hockey players
- Luck can overwhelm strategy in certain dice-heavy sequences
- Visual design and components can be hard to parse during play, especially for new players
- sporting competition, team dynamics, athletic prowess
- A hockey arena with red vs blue teams, arena modifiers, and in-game fights
- thematic, fast-paced push-your-luck skirmish with asymmetric roles
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Arena cards — Arena cards alter rules or provide constraints (e.g., entering the crease) to shape how you approach plays.
- Asymmetric player abilities — Each arena/position gives different movement speeds and special actions, creating varied strategic options per player.
- Dice pool escalation — As you pass the puck and advance, your dice pool grows; you can re-roll via stamina tokens or bench options to keep going.
- Push your luck with dice — On each action you roll a pool of dice; successes allow you to continue, failures end the action early unless mitigated by other mechanics.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- the perfect game for this series and it's a perfect game because we're Canadians
- it's very thematic, it plays like hockey, it is as close to a game of hockey you can get in a board game
- I freaking love this game
- this game is going to board game night this week
- I think it's a really good middleweight light middleweight area control game
References (from this video)
- Pure winter hockey vibe
- Accessible for players who like sports themes
- Ice hockey tactics and mini(board) game battles
- Winter hockey skirmish
- skirmish-style with dice and puck-passing
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Hockey actions on a board — Roll dice to activate passes, shots, checks; manage team movement on ice
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- winter is coming okay winter is oh shoot
- there's a game called winter this one's perfect good God
References (from this video)
- Unique dice system for action resolution
- Thematic hockey flavor
- Rules can be intricate for casual players
- Competitive sports with dice-driven actions
- Sports/hockey themed board game
- Fast-paced, arcade-sports feel
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- action selection — Choose players and actions, then resolve in sequence
- dice push-your-luck — Roll dice to determine success of actions; more push increases risk
- miniatures-based components — Pre-assembled minis for players
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- it's really quick it takes around an hour to play feels like this epic scope
- the coolest part is during some of those phases you will also activate all the robots in a single line and they have different powers
- it's one of my favorite Euro games
- I would put it into another person's collection
- we played it just last week
- please be our supporter because it's the best way how we can make these videos and continue making videos