We've had this game from Spanish publisher Meridiano 6 for some time waiting to be featured on Board's Eye View but the review got lost in our file system because the title got autocorrected to Halflings. It's perhaps a forgiveable error, particularly as the game does in fact involve halflings (the copyright-free way of referring to Hobbitses).
Hatflings then is a game about halflings who are flinging hats in a competitive dance. The designers are Fernando Chavarria and Judit Hurtado, which left us wondering whether the English wordplay at the heart of this game's theme has any purchase in Spanish...Lanzamiento de sombrero?? Probably not.
In this two-player game, each player (purple or yellow) has a team of six 'special halflings', each of which has a special ability and/or limitation affecting their placement or movement. All the other playing pieces make up a pool of general halflings - purple on one side and yellow on the other. The game is played on a 6 x 6 board and on your turn you either place one of your special halflings or one from the general pool with your colour face up, or you move one of your halflings already on the board.
Halflings can be placed in any empty space which is adjacent to a halfling that's already there. Movement is by jumping over a rival piece, othogonally or diagonally, as in checkers/draughts, but the twist in this game is that the piece that jumps changes the colour of all the rival halflings in squares adjacent to where the piece lands. That means it should at least change the piece that you jumped over but it could potentially switch up to seven more halflings. The game ends when a player cannot introduce or move any more halflings, so certainly when the board is full but very possibly sooner than that, and the win goes to the player with the most pieces of their colour on the board.
Tho' Hatflings is in reality an abstract strategy game, the 'special' halflings and some additional terrain rules ensure you don't lose sight of the theme. The game board suggests an indoor dance floor on one side and a grassy outside surface on the other; there's no gameplay difference between the two but the options add to the schtick of the game. In set up you can add obstacles to the playing area (immovable trees or columns, a pig that moves around the board and puddles which only temporaily block a space). You can also place out boxes on which a halfling can be placed and from where they can't be jumped - tho' they are vulnerable to the special halfling on stilts - and barrels, which act like boxes except that a halfling attempting to get on top of one involves a 50/50 chance of the barrel collapsing and eliminating the halfling. The 'special' halflings are fun once you work out how best to use them but they do tho' add fiddly extra rules so we'd recommend playing without them in the first instance and then gradually introducing them into the mix.
Lorena Azpiri's art matches the tongue-in-cheek nature of this light strategy game. And with most plays taking no more than a filler-length 20 minutes, Hatflings is never going to outstay its welcome. Indeed, if your experience is like ours, you'll find players clamouring to immediately rejoin the dance, particularly as they realise the extra tactics open to them in making use of their various 'special' halflings.