Publisher: Gut Bustin’ Games
Designer: Lisa Steenson
Artists: Jud Lively, Lance T. Miller, Two Tree Art, and Lindsey Woodward
Year: 2011
Players: Two to four players
Ages: 13+
Playing Time: 90 Minutes
Genre: Light, family styled, roll and move game
Retail Price: $31.99
Oh Gnome You Don’t is Gut Bustin’ Games third board game publication. It is a roll and move plus game, and by plus I mean that there are some extra mechanics added to make it more than just a simple roll and move game.
The object of the game is to be the gnome with the most gems after every player has crossed the finish line. Collecting said gems is your main pursuit as you proceed through a gnometastic world, causing problems for the other gnomes and sometimes fighting them for the precious gems.
The game is thematic. You are in a world of gnomes filled with mushrooms, berries, trolls, field mice, slugs, bushes, and a stone path. In fact it resembles the backyard of someone who is addicted to lawn gnomes, fairies, and the like. The artwork is well done and should appeal to anyone with a predilection for fairy people art.
You begin the game by selecting your gnome, and these are cardboard standups with plastic bases that have cute little gnomes in various poses on them. You can actually buy fully painted gnome miniatures from Gut Bustin’ Games if you want to add that extra bit of whimsy to the game.
The game can handle up to five players, so after selecting your gnome you pick the corresponding stack of brawl cards. Place your gnomes on the start space, deal two green draw cards to each player and you are ready to go.
Each turn, you will roll the dice and move your gnome along the path accordingly. If you land on the same space as another gnome, you can brawl, which I will mention more about later. After moving you can play a card.
The cards come in three flavors: green, red, and purple. The green cards are played in front of you and will be worth a certain number of gems when you cash them in at one of the four “stores” along the trail. Only cards that you have played in front of you are eligible to be cashed in.
Red cards are interrupt cards and can be played at any time. You use these on other players to stop some particular action. This is where the infamous “Oh Gnome You Don’t” card lives, which will counter any card another player drops on you. Of course, they can throw another Oh Gnome You Don’t card back at you, so be careful.
The Purple cards can only be played during your turn and have some action on them that is either good for you or bad for someone else. The hungry hamster will eat one of another player’s green tabled cards if it is food, but not Juniper berries! Yuck! A mining card will allow your gnome to pilfer a gem from the mine. Woot! There are many other purple cards as well. After you play a card, you draw a card and your turn is over.
Along the route you will pass several businesses: The Grub and Grog Pub, Gnome Depot (lol), Toadstool Café, and the Tinker’s Cart. When you move past one of these businesses, you can choose to go inside and sell your green item cards off for gems. There are four different colors of gems, each with different values that are printed right on the board. You discard the green cards and collect the gems, which ends that turn. The cards have their value in gems printed on them, and there is a bonus for selling a card at a particular store, which can be helpful if you plan your strategy and no one screws you over.
The Tinker’s cart is different. There you barter for gems, which means you roll a die and collect that amount in gems for each green card you trade in.
The game is filled with moments of causing problems for the other gnomes. You will be stealing their gems, green cards, moving them around, and generally being an annoyance. If you play with the advanced brawling rules (and I recommend that you do), then the game gets even more cutthroat. Each player has a stack of ten brawling cards ranging in viciousness from the Ear Flick (attack value of one), to the dreaded Wedgie Yank (attack value of ten). If you land on the same space as one or more other gnomes, anyone there can chooses to brawl. Each player involved chooses a card from their brawling cards and reveals them at the same time. The highest value card wins the bout and collects the difference between the card values in gems from the losers. The trick is that you discard that brawling card after use and your stack of brawling cards gets smaller and smaller as you fight. Eventually you will be forced to use your lower value cards, so you might not want to spend the whole game kickin’ butt and takin’ names.
There are a couple of other little board mechanics that will effect movement, like the troll bridge which you can pay to pass, or go around the back way which will take a lot longer as there are a few “Go Back X spaces” there.
As each gnome passes the finish line they get gem bonuses (or penalties) depending on where they finish, the first player to cross getting the biggest bonus. After the last player crosses, you count up your total gem value and the highest amount wins.
Oh Gnome You Don’t was a fun family game, if you have kids that won’t get upset with getting attacked or messed with constantly. I can’t see getting together with my gaming buddies and playing a game, but for families and gnome aficionados it is a good fit. I suspect that the recommended age of 13+ has something to do with having kids mature enough to handle the constant attacks, but this game can easily be played with kids much younger if they have already learned the “It’s just a game” lesson and they won’t eat the little gem pieces.
The game ran a little long for me. The more players, the better for this game, as you get that much more brawling in, and with a full complement of five players it does take the full 90 minutes to play that it states in the rules. I’d rather lose one of the businesses and cut out a swath of tiles to shorten the game to an hour or less.
The rules are well done and very simple, my only problem was that there is no rule for breaking ties. This actually happened on our first game, so we ruled that the first one who crossed the finish line won the tiebreaker. I’d like some official ruling though.
You can actually play the game without the brawling cards if you wish. I didn’t wish to though as that was half the fun. It is difficult to fit more than one gnome on the same space, so I do wish that I had the miniatures as they would fit better. Plus it would be harder for the kids to bowl over all of the pieces with the die when they roll it. My daughter managed to take out three gnomes with one roll. Heck maybe that could be another sub-game. Gnome Bowling.
Something else that would be cool is if there were some riddle cards you could use when trying to cross the troll bridge. Instead of paying, you could choose to answer a riddle that someone else would draw and select. If you are right, you get to cross, and if you are wrong you have to take the long way. I realize of course the problem with this is coming up with all the riddles and adding another bunch of cards to the game, but it would add to the theme and another little sub-game.
Overall, it is a light, cute, (if rather uninspiring) cutthroat game for families. Just remember it is only a game, so you don’t need to pick up your pieces and go gnome. Sorry, I just had to…
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