Ganz Schön Clever

Ganz Schön Clever (That's Pretty Clever in English) is a roll & write game published in the US by Stronghold Games. In it, you utilize dice you roll as well as the dice other people roll in order to fill up a sheet as best you can so you can earn more points than everybody else.

 

Each person starts the game with a sheet and pen. On a person's turn that person will roll all the dice and choose one to keep and mark his or her sheet. Any dice with a lower value than the chosen die get placed on the silver platter for later and then the person rerolls all the other dice. Again, the person will keep one die, mark his or her sheet, place lower value dice on the platter, then reroll. After keeping a third die and marking his or her sheet, all the remaining dice go to the platter and everybody else then gets to pick one of the dice on the platter to mark on their sheets. When marking your sheet, you need to keep in mind how each color area scores. In the yellow and blue areas, you mark different spaces in a grid and earn rewards for full horizontal and vertical lines. In the green, orange and purple areas, you mark spaces one at a time with various placement restrictions in the green and purple areas and potentially low value scoring in the orange.

 

What makes Ganz Schön Clever a fun game is that it remains simple to understand and play while being engaging and offering a good amount of choice throughout. Like most roll & write games with dice, there of course exists the threat of one player rolling better than the others, but it is mitigated in Ganz Schön Clever by having different ways to score from the various areas and offering rerolls and extra dice along the way. I recommend Ganz Schön Clever for people who are looking for a reasonably small and simple game that challenges you each time by having to utilize your dice as best you can.

 

-Alapai