Snow Tails

Snow Tails is a racing game where the players compete to get their dog sleds around the track first – whilst avoiding taking too much damage en route.

The board is made of modular pieces that allow you to build different kinds of tracks, of variable shape and difficulty: your first game should probably just have a couple of corners but after that you can introduce obstacles such as trees, and a chicane etc.

Each player has a sled with two dogs on it. The dogs have a default value of three that denotes their speed.  Players also get a set of dog cards that, on their turn, they play to their sled changing the speed: this is the value of the dogs’ combined scores, minus the brake score. Oh yes, the brake score. On these sleds your brake is always on, but its power can vary: your turn involves playing between one and three dog cards from your hand, and you can discard a card in order to change your brake value. Once you’ve played your cards and calculated your speed, you move your sled.

But beware – although moving your sled is simple, controlling it is less easy. For your dogs will often have mismatching speeds, and when this happens your sled will drift in the direction of the stronger dog. This drift is absolutely necessary at times – it’s the only way to get around corners – but at other times it hampers you somewhat. On the rare occasions your dogs are balanced – scoring the same speed – you have the option of taking an extra move, pushing your sled forward the amount of spaces equal to your position in the race. This can be a game-winner. But it can also be a push-your-luck move to pressure the other players… and perhaps worth taking a hit; the hit in question being a damage card that clogs up your hand for the rest of the game and reduces your cardplay options.

The game finishes at the end of a round when someone has crossed the finish line. If more than one player has achieved this, the winner is the player who has travelled furthest over the line.