Green Box of Games

The game Hey! That’s my Fish(2003) designed by Günter Cornett and Alvydas Jakeliunas is a challenging abstract strategy game disguised as a funny children’s game about penguins collecting fish. The Green Box includes neither penguins nor fish, but there’s lots of other stuff to collect.

Components used:

All 36 tiles

1-3 cubes pr player (more cubes with fewer players)

Setup:

Shuffle the tiles and build a board with a hexagonal structure. Use face up for more strategy, or face down for more chance. The board can be any shape, and doesn’t have to be symmetrical, although that might ensure a more balanced game.

Select a starting player. The players, in turn, chose starting positions for their pieces on the board, starting with the player to the right of the starting player and moving counter clockwise to end with the starting player. If players have more cubes, they place one at a time in this sequence.

Play:

On your turn, you move one of your pieces in a straight line as many tiles as you want. After you move, you pick up the tile on which you started your turn, and place it in front of you.

Tiles that are removed leave blank spaces in the table, and no player is allowed to move across blank spaces. In this way, you can block your opponents by carefully choosing your moves.

You are also not allowed to move into or across a tile occupied by another players piece.

Keep moving in turns until no pieces are able to move any more. The players then acquire the tiles on which their pieces ended their movement, and the game is over.

Winner:

Count the tiles acquired by each player. Each tile is worth one point. Count the symbols each player has collected, and award 2 extra points for each set of 3 identical symbols a player has collected. The player with the most points win.