Schooled by the Game: Latice Hawaii Game Review

    The game Latice Hawaii taught us a lesson that might apply to people, too: don't trust your first impression. Here's how we got schooled: 

 

    I had a birthday coming up--always a good excuse to browse games and add them to my Amazon list, not that I need much of an excuse. Latice Hawaii had stellar reviews, award stickers galore on the box, and it was reasonably priced. It seemed an obvious pick. When my birthday arrived, I happily found this game beneath some gift wrap. This is going to be fun, I thought.

 

    And then it wasn’t.

 

    Oh, it was okay, pretty simple to learn, too. 

    You divide the colorful tiles evenly between players and then players take turns placing them on the ocean-blue board. You have to match either the color or the symbol of neighboring tiles, and you earn stones for extra turns depending on the number of sides you can match at once. The object of the game is to be the first player to use all your tiles.

 

    There are also wind tiles that allow you to move a tile already on the board before placing your own. In our first so-so game, we used these wind tiles but really didn’t know what to do with them. In a second, let's-give-it-one-more-shot game, someone—the businessman, most likely—used a wind tile to clear his whole hand in one turn. The aha switch clicked on in our brains: Wind power—we had to harness it.

 

    Once we did, our level of enjoyment skyrocketed. A meh game suddenly became so fun that even our game-hater liked it. It was still simple to play, but so much more engaging with that increased amount of strategy.

    And so, if you're ever tempted, don’t let that first impression deceive you. Play the game a second time—or even a third or a fourth—before you relegate it to the back of the closet. It might even go from flop to favorite--if you give it a chance. 

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# Players . . . 2-4

Ages 8 and up

Game time . . . . . . . . 20 minutes

Set up . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 minutes

Luck   . . . . . . . . 7. . . Strategy

*Interplay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Visual Appeal . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Component Quality . .. . . . . 9

*Replayability . . . . . . . . . . . 9

*See "How we Rate" for a definition.

 

Here's another game that had us playing a third or fourth time before we caugth onto the strategy that made it fun. (Hint: use your camels).