Dip Me in the Water
Next up in the never-ending series of Button Shy Kickstarters, everybody’s favourite puzzler ROVE will get new versions and expansions (and probably a reprint while they’re at it). It's 18-card game ROVE: Results-Oriented Versatile Explorer that we're talking about here by the way, not the completely unrelated Rove – we’ll discuss that campaign in May.
ROVE has crash-landed on an alien planet and needs to complete missions to survive. Six cards are the modules of your explorer, the other cards have missions printed on one side, and movement points on the other. Your starting hand size depends on the difficulty level you choose, then you try to get the right configuration of your modules to solve a mission, using movement points to change the layout. Every module has a one-time use ability as well, and all movement cards give bonuses if you manage to have the modules in a specific configuration. You have to solve seven missions to win the game, and the result is a nice panorama that depicts all adventures of ROVE. Like this:
One of the new versions is Aqua ROVE, where your bot dives underwater. The missions get displayed vertically this time, so your adventure will have ROVE diving deeper and deeper. There’s a change in the rules as well: the modules do not have their own specific movement patterns anymore, but the movement cards do. A whole new way to puzzle things out. There’ll be a promo card as well to link ROVE and Aqua ROVE.
The other new version is ROVE Jr, featuring simplified gameplay to make it suitable for children of age 4+, and let’s be honest here, for folks like me.
Personal opinion: Even though I normally don’t order Button Shy games through Kickstarter because of the extra costs for Europe, I am tempted to make an exception this time. I think I would enjoy to play ROVE once in a while and like I said, the Jr-version is tailor-made for pea-brained people like me. I also like the illustrations and the idea of building a story tableau with the mission cards.
The campaign for Aqua ROVE, ROVE Jr and expansions will launch on Kickstarter this Tuesday, April 9.
I received ROVE back in February, but these wallet games are so small that I lost it somewhere in my mess. It's a shame because I am really looking forward to trying it!