Scribbly Gum - A Perfectly Adapted Roll-and-Write for Families

0:00 today we're going to take a look at the game scribbly gum one of three new family board games designed and produced by Phil Walker Harding the designer of games such as Baron Park gizmos or another that I've highly recommended explorers in fact explorers is the game that scribbly gum is most similar to I would say that this is a more family-friendly version of explorers so in this video I'm going to teach you how to play scribbly gum and I'll tell you about how it went over with our family and what we really loved about this game foreign this game has no limit to the number of players so to set up the game simply give every player one sheet from the pad of tree diagrams and they'll have to get their own writing utensil optionally if you're playing with objectives you can lay those out one to three objectives where all players can see and then one player is going to need the movement tiles which they are going to shuffle and keep face down this game is played over the course of three rounds Each of which consists of seven turns which are called out by the player who has the movement tiles or also known as the mother moth every player in the game is a baby moth and their objective is to eat food which is going to draw out these scribbly patterns on the surface of the scribbly gum trees bark there are three ways to get points in this game either by completing sets of

1:30 nuts Leafs and Blossoms or by getting 15 of any one type or by satisfying the achievements now for each turn the mother moth is going to turn over a movement tile and call out the direction or directions on that tile when the direction is called out all players simultaneously are allowed to connect one of their filled in spaces to a new space moving along the called out Direction They bubble in the new space mark their scoring and when everyone is done the mother moth can move on to the next movement tile the only Interruption to this flow of gameplay is when a player bubbles in one of the bonuses that allows them to move additionally one extra space in any of the four directions up down left or right when a player takes a bonus movement this can sometimes trigger an additional bonus movement so there are some really fun chain reactions now at the end of every round players are going to score one point for every set they've completed so far and this is cumulative so at the end of the second round they're going to score four points for all of the complete sets in the second round and again in the third round so if a player ever com fills in all 15 bubbles of a certain type that's a three point bonus and when playing with achievements they will score if they've completed any of the achievement tiles and that's the entire game now at this part of the review I normally rate a game on its

3:00 five attributes theme mechanics components strategy and complexity but with this being a very family-friendly game it fits the ideal family board game profile so with that profile what you want is you want games that are very engaging with their mechanics not very complex or too involved strategically and then often along with that the theme score is not very high because when a theme gets extremely involved the game takes on a lot more additional complexity which you don't need and that in this game fits that profile just as you would expect it to theme about a three mechanics maybe an eight components and 8 strategy a three complexity of one but what I want to talk about isn't so much the attributes but the outstanding characteristics of this game and this game company see what became very clear as soon as I tried all three of these games is that the company is very Mission lined even when you receive the box in the mail it's very environmentally conscious and it does that in a few ways one there's the sustainability of the packaging the game doesn't arrive shrink wrapped it just has little stickers on the side and there are no components that are made out of plastic in addition to that if you read the end of the rule book it says that there are several Charities that this game donates to or the company donates to for the proceeds of this game they give one percent to Greening Australia one percent for the planet and

4:33 then they also pay the rent which is what they call their donations to the indigenous people in Australia where the games are produced so there are good causes that they are supporting with the production of these games and then the game is very clearly committed to education and enrichment for families there is some excellent information here about the scribbly gum trees and they don't make any compromises on any of the other games too there's a very educationally driven purpose behind this company and what they want to make and then the game is very accessible so for theme I say it's a three because this is not you know a thematic game you're not you know simulating anything here it's really just a kind of typical role in right or flip and write so you're mostly thinking about just collecting those resources but I love the educational quality about this game and I wanted to call attention to that for the mechanics I'm you know it's a lot of fun this game plays very quickly the nice thing about scribbly gum is the consistency every game there's you know there's two sides of the player board so there's two variations on uh what board you're playing on and there and there's some slight changes on how it's done but gameplay is really really predictable uh you can throw in the achievements if you want to or not there are four different achievements or oh

6:04 sorry there are there are eight different achievements and you can use up to three of them and I will say though that as you get more familiar with the game those achievements really help uh make the gameplay more interesting we played a three player game without achievements and we had a three-way tie so the achievements will kind of mix things up make it a little bit more challenging as you play more and more so if you can't tell I'm really excited about this game we've played it multiple times and we really enjoy playing it but the thing I want to end on is what makes this game different from the other two games being produced by Joey games so first and foremost there's no limit to the number of players we are at four person family which is really convenient for most board games but if you've got more people in your family or if you're you know having family gather come over for a large party this is a great game for that the fact that everyone is taking their turn at the same time you've got the one person calling out the direction and everyone's making their move at the same time leads to just really fluid gameplay the other two games have a very different mechanic and very different objective so pass the party food that is a Cooperative game that plays up to five players the mechanic there is tile placing and then lastly busy beaks that is a competitive card game that does require some amount of reading it's the most complex of these scribbly gum and past the party food I would say would play well with kids as young as five my recommendation is a little bit lower than what it says on the box and then with uh busy beaks I think that's with

7:37 kids at least age seven and above if you want to check out those other reviews I'll be sure to put links in description and at the end of this video I also did an unboxing where I looked at all three at the same time thanks again for watching this video and I will see you next time bye