The goats are loose! Eat all the random items you can find and fill your belly before you’re wrangled back to the petting zoo.
What Is Goats’ Day Out?
Goats’ Day Out is a polyomino-placement game for 2 to 5 players, ages 8 and up, and takes about 30 minutes to play. It retails for $19.99 and is available directly from Ravensburger or in stores. The gameplay is easy to learn and plays quickly, but younger players may need a little assistance with scoring.
Goats’ Day Out was designed by Rebecca Bleau and Nicholas Cravatta of BlueMatter Games and published by ThinkFun and Ravensburger, with illustrations by Mike Dashow.
Goats’ Day Out components. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Goats’ Day Out Components
Here’s what comes in the box:
— Score board
— 5 Goat boards
— 5 Street trays
— 5 Scoring markers
— 5 Lap markers
— 7 Stone tiles
— 17 Gold tiles
— 18 Coin tiles
— 66 Food tiles
5 unique goats! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The street trays and the goat boards are both dual-layered cardboard. The streets have a simple raised edge so that they can be passed from player to player without spilling tiles everywhere. The goats are all unique, each with its own illustration and particular cutout shape that will hold the various tiles. Each goat has some number of squares that are shaded in. The illustrations are really cute (and I actually like them a little better than the ones on the box cover).
Food tiles come in blue, pink, and yellow, as well as mixed. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The “food” pieces are polyomino tiles from 3 to 5 square units in size, and they depict actual foods, toys, clothing, and many other random things. Each tile has one or two background colors — blue, pink, and yellow — and may or may not have a bite mark taken out of it. (There are chomped and whole versions of many of the items, with illustrations altered to match.)
The score board looks like a sidewalk around a city block, with a track that goes up to 30, and then several tracks (one per player) for laps around the board. It did seem a little strange at first to have laps at 30 points instead of 50, but it turns out that 30 is the score if you manage to fit all 10 pieces each round, so it kind of works out. The scoring markers are tall, narrow standees that actually topple kind of easily, especially if multiple players have the same score; simple punchouts (like the lap tokens) may have been easier to handle.
How to Play Goats’ Day Out
The Goal
The goal of the game is to score the most points in three rounds by filling your goat most efficiently and grouping types of foods together.
5-player setup. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Setup
Give each player a goat board and a street board.
Set the bonus tiles (gold bars and coins) and the rock tiles in a supply near the center, as well as the score board. Give each player 10 random food tiles, placing them in the street trays, spread out so that all the tiles are visible.
Hmm, what should I eat first? Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Gameplay
Gameplay is simultaneous: each player looks at their street, and secretly selects a tile they want to take. When everyone has given a thumbs-up, then everyone picks up the piece they selected, and then place it into their goat board. You are allowed to rotate or flip a piece as desired, but once you’ve decided where to place it, you cannot move it in later rounds.
Note: while you are allowed to place a piece anywhere it will fit, you may get bonuses for grouping foods of the same color, grouping chomped pieces, and filling in the shaded squares in your goat. You’ll also lose points for unfilled spaces, so pack those tiles in nicely!
Once you’ve all placed your tiles, pass the street trays to the left.
Filling in the shaded squares earns you a bonus. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
If you manage to cover all of the shaded squares in your goat, you immediately get a bonus. You may take a coin or a gold bar, which can be added to your goat at any time (or saved for future turns). Or, if you’re feeling baaaad, you may take a stone and put it in somebody else’s goat — the stone blocks things from being placed there, and will not score points at the end of the round.
The round continues until all 10 tiles have been taken from each street. If you’re ever unable to place a tile, you still take one from the street and just discard it.
A perfectly filled goat! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
At the end of the round, everyone first removes any stones that are in their goat and discards them, and then scores points for their goats as follows:
— Gain 3 point per tile placed in your goat (including bonus tiles)
— Lose 1 point for each unfilled square in your goat
— Gain 5 bonus points if your goat is completely filled
— Gain 1 point per tile for your largest connected group of chomped pieces
For each of the three colors, you award combo points to the player who has the most pieces of that color touching each other — that player gets 1 point per tile from that group. (In case of a tie, all tied players get the bonus.)
In the photo above, this player would get 33 points for the 11 tiles, plus a bonus 5 points for filling the goat. There are 6 chomped pieces all touching each other, so that’s 6 bonus points. If they had the most blue pieces touching each other (but not pink or yellow), they score 5 bonus points for the 5 blue pieces, for a grand total of 49 points for the round.
After everyone has scored their points, return all the food tiles and bonus tokens to the supply, and everyone passes their goat to the left. (In a 2-player game, you’ll set aside the food tokens that were used each round and just use what’s remaining in the supply; in the third round, take a goat from the three unused goats instead of taking your original goat back.) Give everyone 10 food pieces and start a new round!
Game End
The game ends after three rounds. Whoever has the highest score wins! (There’s no tiebreaker in the rulebook but perhaps you can have an eating contest or something.)
Trying to collect yellow tiles for a combo bonus! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Why You Should Play Goats’ Day Out
As a lifelong Tetris fan, I’m always happy to try a new polyomino game. Finding the optimal arrangement of tiles, betting on being able to get a particular shape later, and the delight when a piece fits exactly into the space you’ve left for it — these are some of the highlights of this type of game.
Goats’ Day Out is a fun take on the genre. With each goat having its own unique shape to fill (not to mention the different shaded areas to earn the bonus), everyone’s puzzle is slightly different, but the pool of available food tiles is set at the start of each round. The pick-and-pass aspect keeps the game going quickly, because everyone is choosing and playing at the same time, so there’s not as much downtime. And the rules are generally simple enough that younger kids can join in; one of the benefits of polyomino games is that filling up spaces efficiently is an intuitive goal, and placing same-colored pieces next to each other for bonus points is also easy to remember.
At the basic level, that’s a pretty good puzzle already: get a tray of pieces, pick one for your goat, and find a spot for it. It can feel a little like a solo puzzle (which ThinkFun is well-known for). But once you’re familiar with the rules of the game, you can also take it to the next level: look ahead at the next few street trays that will be coming your way, and see what pieces might be coming. Or check out what color groupings your neighbors are building — do you think you can outnumber them in a particular color, or should you shift gears and go for a color that fewer people are taking?
What keeps this from being just a “multi-player solitaire” experience is the passing of the trays — you get a glimpse of what’s coming your way, and you also know what pieces you’re leaving for the next player. If somebody downstream from you really needs a 2x2 square and you’ve got one in your tray, you get to decide whether it’s something you can use to deny them, or if you’re going to let them take it later. And, of course, the color bonuses are awarded to the player who has the most of each color, which means that you do want to pay attention to what other players are doing, or you may get several color groups that are all just one tile too small and score no bonus points at all.
The stones are the other major disruptor, though I’ll admit that in most of my plays, my groups were all too nice to use them. Everyone preferred to take the bonus gold and coin tiles rather than throwing stones into somebody else’s goat to block them. It’s a fun (and a bit mean) way to directly affect somebody else’s board, but being able to fill in the 1- and 2-space holes in your own board may just be more valuable, especially if you can completely fill your goat for that 5-point bonus.
Playing this reminded me a little bit of Planet Unknown, another fun polyomino game that I reviewed earlier this year. As with Planet Unknown, you’re each filling in spaces with tiles, and everyone is selecting tiles from a limited set of options at the same time. Goats’ Day Out is quite a bit simpler, of course, with no special technology tracks, nor a decision about which set of options each player is choosing from. It’s a quicker game for that, so it can scratch that same puzzle itch even when you don’t have time (or space) for the big Planet Unknown experience.
In short, Goats’ Day Out is an excellent entry-level polyomino game. Its silly theme, fun illustrations, and quick play time make it family-friendly, while still giving more experienced players some strategic options so they don’t get bored. And allowing for some direct conflict for gaming groups who like to be a bit more confrontational is a nice bonus that isn’t always present in this sort of game.
For more about Goat’s Day Out, visit the Ravensburger website!
A smorgasboard of delights! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
