In this game designed by Marek Matas with art by Iveta Dolezalova, the premise is that pigeons, squirrels and mice are defending their park by attacking human visitors. It’s the pigeons et al that the players represent, with the human visitors merely contributing the victory point values that the players are competing to secure.
It’s a simple game where players choose the visitors they want to target and they each play a card face down in the hope of winning that target. They will win the target and score its points value by playing cards at that location that total more than any other player.
If you were solely playing cards with numerical values then this would make for a very slight game but what introduces a degree of strategy are the special effect cards that allow peeks at other players’ hands or which switch the cards already placed by an opponent. These, coupled with the opportunities for bluffing, are what makes Pigeonpocalypse a playable game.
Pigeonpocalypse notionally takes 2–6 players but there’s not much of a game if you try to play it with just two. It becomes more interesting as you raise the player count but there are practical difficulties keeping track of who has played which card if you take the player count above four. We found that to play with six we had to add our own coloured tokens so that each player could mark out the cards they had played.
The early version of the game that we played was classified as NSFW because one of the park visitors is a ‘flasher’ but the inclusion of that (inexplicit) card didn’t seem to justify marking the game as 'not suitable for work' (or children). It would be better to ditch that card and keep Pigeonpocalypse as a light family game.
Pigeonpocalypse has launched today on Kickstarter. Click here to check out the campaign.