Tales & Games: Baba Yaga
15m
2 - 5 Players
Ages 6+
Meeple on Board Rating
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Many Russian tales speak of the character of Baba Yaga, the ogress witch who lives in a house with chicken legs. Fortunately for them, children always find unexpected allies and manage to escape her. Will you prove as fortunate?
In Baba Yaga, you need to escape the claws of the hideous Baba Yaga. To do so, however, you need to collect the ingredients for your three spell cards, and to do that you need to search the forest while Baba Yaga searches for you.
To set up the game, place nine Baba Yaga tiles in a cross to form a flight path, then place the 16 ingredient tokens face down, with four tokens in each section of the cross. Each player starts the game with three spell cards, which must remain hidden. On a turn, the active player reveals her top spell card, which shows four ingredients, then starts searching for these ingredients in the forest, turning over tiles one by one with a single hand and hiding those she doesn’t need. While she does this, the other players take turns moving the Baba Yaga figurine one step at a time along one branch of the flight path, then back. If Baba Yaga completes a circuit before the player finds the ingredients, she must place her spell card on the bottom of her stack; if she finds the ingredients, however, she gets to cast the spell on the card, lengthening or shortening the flight path, swapping the location of ingredients, requiring fewer ingredients next time, forcing an opponent to play in a distorted position, and so on. The first player to complete her three spells wins!
Baba Yaga includes variants for younger players, more experienced players, and those who want the chicken-legged house to be constantly on the move. In the two-player game, the single opponent does all the moving of Baba Yaga, but must swap hands with each move, keeping the inactive hand on her head.
Ages | 6+ |
---|---|
Players | 2 Players, 3 Players, 4 Players, 5 Players |
Play Time | 15m |
Designer | Jérémie Caplanne |
Mechanics | Memory, Simultaneous Action Selection |
Theme | Action / Dexterity, Children's Game, Memory, Novel-based, Party Game, Real-time |
Publisher | 2 Pionki, Purple Brain Creations, Albi, Asterion Press, Delta Vision Publishing, IELLO, Lex Games, Portal Games |
cymric
[color=#dd0000][b](Children's game, therefore left unrated.)[/b][/color] A surprisingly difficult children's game in which you try to locate ingredients for a spell to ward off the evil Baba Yaga before she completes a tour through the forest, and puts you in the cookpot again. Even though the number of spell ingredients is small, and hints are given on the front side of the tiles, Baba Yaga is moved so quickly, with so much distraction from arms of the players moving her one by one over the playing area, that finding the right ones is genuinely [i]very[/i] difficult, even for adults. Let alone that you need to become so good at it that you complete 3 spells before you escape for good and win the game. Children's games were never this engaging nor this demanding when I was a little boy, and as such I was very much surprised by this title. My son is still far too young to play Baba Yaga (the only thing he'd do at the time of writing is stick the tiles in his mouth, and subsequently bang the wettened cardboard on the floor, grinning like there is no tomorrow) but this might actually make it to my collection of children's games if he takes to liking them. As indicated this game won't be rated, but I will hand out a respectful [i]Bravo![/i] to the author for his efforts.
firevolcano18
our daughter was able to enjoy gaming this one, so it is fine by me. Real time, where opponents operate cooperatively against you during your turn. That's actually a pretty cool mechanic.
ColtsFan76
I have this because I like the series and my kids enjoy the games. This has been my least favorite though it is still a decent game. Baba Yaga doesn't seem to be a well know fable here so that may have a little to do with my lukewarmness on it. The other issue I have with it is the subjective nature of the "tier." it is a clever mechanic but can be a little difficult to manage with the younger kids and the chaos it creates. It is definitely a notch above the typical memory matching games and even the clues on the back of the tiles are subtle enough in most cases to keep it a challenge.