Base price: $25.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly? (I assume it’s coming stateside … sometime.)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of ICECOOL Wizards was provided by Brain Games.
Oh, heck, friends; it’s a new ICECOOL game. And not an ICECOOL Universe game (sorry, Pyramid of Pengqueen; I actually enjoy that game a lot, that said), but a full-on penguin-flicking extravaganza game. Hyped to heck and back about this one, and it was a joy to photograph. You really can have it all. Anyways, before I spend the entire review just talking about how ICECOOL is an ongoing favorite series of mine, let’s check out ICECOOL Wizards!
In ICECOOL Wizards, you’re going to a school for magic! And not some weird TERFy one; a school full of magic penguins. Essentially, the dream. However, exam season is coming up soon, so you better make sure you’ve learned everything! One of the classes is History of Penguin Magic; that literally causes me to digress every time I think about it. It’s so good. But anyways. You’ll need to slide around, learn some more lessons, and occasionally trade knowledge with your penguin peers! Will you be able to earn a passing grade?
Contents
Setup
Setup is a bit easier than the other ICECOOL games because there’s just a bit less of everything. First, attach the various pieces of the board together to form the play area:
Then, let each player pick their penguin card of choice.
For each penguin card picked, give that player the corresponding penguin token.
Shuffle the Exam Cards and place one in the six indicated corners of the board, face-up:
The Lesson Cards are a bit more finicky. So you’ll shuffle them and then reveal them one at a time, placing them either on their symbol or across the doorway with their symbol. If you reveal one that’s already been placed, discard it and draw again until you’ve placed three unique symbols.
That should be enough to get you started!
Gameplay
In ICECOOL Wizards, over a series of rounds, players will flick their penguins around (and over) the board space until they’ve gathered enough Lesson Cards to complete various Exam Cards (also around the board). Play continues until the Exam Card deck is depleted.
On a turn, the current player flicks their penguin twice. Generally, this will cause the penguin to move around the board, through doorways, and in and out of the five “classrooms” in the three rooms of the play area. If you move completely through a doorway or enter, exit, or move around within a classroom, you take the corresponding Lesson Card and place it in front of you. Some of these Lesson Cards are Spells (the doorway cards), which can be flipped over for effects (an extra flick, forcing other players to discard, adding more Lesson Cards to the board; things like that). If you bump into an opponent, you can force them to trade a Lesson Card of your choice with you! Sharing is fun.
Should you cross over an Exam Card, you may discard matching face-up Lesson Cards (the blue Spell is wild) to take the Exam Card for points! At the end of your turn, any empty Exam Card spaces are refilled and Lesson Cards are redrawn until there are three unique ones on the board.
Gameplay continues until an empty Exam Card space cannot be refilled. Finish the round and calculate scores! Any Lesson Cards a player has (even flipped-down ones) are worth 1 point. The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Not a ton in this one! The major thing is that, again, since there’s no change in card counts with player count, you should expect player scores to be a bit lower at higher player counts more than anything else. There’s a bit more player contact at higher player counts, as well, so you might be able to get more Exam Cards out of the deal by strategically smacking into everyone like a penguin out of hell, but you can still do that at lower player counts, too. There’s almost only ever three Lesson Cards on the board at any given time, and it only refills to three, so otherwise there’s not much of a difference depending on your player count. One player might swoop the Exam Card that you want, but that can happen with two, three, or four total regardless. Them’s just the breaks. As a result, I don’t have a particularly strong preference for player count, either: I just enjoy the game.
Strategy
- You kind of always want to go where the Lesson Cards are. Getting Lesson Cards is always the right move, especially since they’re just more things you can trade away or more spells you can use to your advantage over the course of the game. Ideally, getting all three in one turn would be super, or using the Green Spell to add two more and pick those up too? Sublime. Just try to get as many as you can.
- It’s great to be able to get a 9, but if you can get quick 3s, that’s not necessarily bad. Exam Cards are how you turn points into victory. That said, they’re all “one Lesson Card for 3 points”; it’s just that the 9s are great because you can get three at once (it’s much harder to hit three Exam Cards in one turn). It’s slightly more efficient, I suppose, but if your opponents are trying and failing to get those required Lessons in, you might be able to swoop a few cheap Exam Cards and take the lead.
- Swapping with your opponents is a very good way to make them mad, but also you gotta get what you need sometimes, you know? Try to give them something that’s not particularly useful. For instance, never give away a Blue Spell or a Yellow Spell, but giving away a symbol you don’t see on the board (or see on a bunch of already-claimed Exam Cards) might be helpful, since it may not be immediately useful again.
- I don’t think jumping over walls is as useful in this game as it was in the other ICECOOL games, but oh well. You really want to be going through doorways, and the board isn’t so big that that isn’t viable. You can still jump over walls to be impressive, but you’ve already got magic tricks; sweet flips aren’t as impressive for wizards, I guess.
- Lesson Cards are still worth points at the end of the game. Again, getting as many as you can is a net positive no matter what. The more you have, the more you get at the end of the game. It’s more efficient to spend them for Exam Cards, but it’s a slight consolation prize (and that’s not nothing!).
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Penguins! Always love a penguin game, and the ICECOOL games are some of my favorites.
- I love a good flicking game as much as anybody. Dexterity games remain one of my favorite genres of games, and there are a lot of very fun dexterity games. I’m almost never mad about seeing a new one.
- The wizard theme is incredibly silly and fairly wholesome. Why are they wizards? Who cares. You’re asking the wrong questions. It’s just nice and silly and fun.
- I really like the art in this game. The rooms have a lot of fun details, as is always the case with the series, but they’re also just visually striking and fun to look at. I imagine younger players are going to get a lot out of finding fun things in the rooms while they’re flicking around.
- Always happy to see more games in the ICECOOL series. I think this is a nice expansion of “what’s possible” with these types of games, the same as Iron Forest was. Where Iron Forest is a bit more … intense, I think this preserves the family game spirit.
- Plays pretty quickly! Doesn’t take too long to set up either; you’re pretty much done in a bit over 30 minutes with setup and teach.
Mehs
- A lot of the male penguins look distinctly haunted, and I kind of love it? They’ve clearly looked directly into the abyss, but that seems to have been a series staple since ICECOOL (maybe ICECOOL2). Either way, keep giving those boys psychic damage, Reinis Pētersons!
- I do miss the larger board; I wish there were a way to integrate this with ICECOOL, though I appreciate the portability. Maybe that will come later; the ICECOOL folks always manage to surprise me with something new.
- I do wonder where this sits with complexity against ICECOOL and which players will take to more readily. ICECOOL seems a bit fundamentally easier, but this is smaller scope and scale. I wish I had more groups of younger players to actually test this out with and watch, because I’m interested to see if the set collection resonates with them or if it’s not as much their thing.
Cons
- The “force other players to discard a card” spell is distinctly a bit too take-that for me. I was hoping the game would be little-to-no take-that given that they clearly changed the “bumping into a player lets you steal a card” to “bumping into a player lets you force them to trade you a card of your choice”, but, hey, you can’t have it all. It’s still relatively low-lift take-that, and honestly, in the games I’ve played, nobody’s used it. Sometimes Chekov’s Gun doesn’t fire.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think ICECOOL Wizards is a solid entry in the ICECOOL franchise! I like the return to the roots of penguins being silly penguins, even if the theming of them sliding around and getting Lesson Cards is a bit incongruous. I legitimately don’t care; it’s fun and neat. I could do without the take-that element of the card discards, but I’m actually very appreciative that they decided to design the game such that you trade Lesson Cards, not steal. I think that takes away a major potential frustration avenue right out the gate. It’ll be interesting to see from a longevity standpoint how this plays. I think there’s a legitimate question of “does the set collection element of the Exam Cards add too much complexity for the targeted player age range?”, though I personally don’t think that it does. I think that the big symbols and the smaller board helps simplify it to some degree without relying on the more challenging dexterity that’s required to be good at ICECOOL. I love it for that reason, but again, to each their own. Either way, I think ICECOOL Wizards adds a lot more to the series. Like Iron Forest, it shows that there are ways to play with the formula and keep it interesting; it adds more player colors and fun art to mix with the original set, and, most critically, it’s just more ICECOOL and I love it for that. If you want to mix things up with a more portable ICECOOL, you want a bit more structure with your game, or you just really like wizards, you might enjoy ICECOOL Wizards! I’ve had fun with it.
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