Cost: $45 From: White Wind, (508) 927-1184 Players: 2-6 Playing Time: 90 minutes Type of game: Family Strategy Skill: 5 Complexity: 4 Reviewed by: Kris Gould, Issue 3.2, Spring 1995
White Wind has come out with some of the most interesting and playable games of the past few years. Freight Train has become one of my gaming group's favorite games, Elfenroads is a fascinating mixture of gaming ideas, and Santa Fe can hold its own compared to any of the best train games around. Even Fishy and Elfengold are more entertaining than most of the games produced by the larger U. S. game companies. So I had no hesitation about buying the latest White Wind / Alan Moon game as soon as it came out.
Mush comes in a bookshelf-sized box with a (pardon the pun) fetching illustration of a husky on the front. Inside are five game boards, six "sled boards", some nice wooden pieces, lots of small white chips and larger grey chips, and twenty four dog dice in red, blue, and green. The artwork, done by Katja Braasch in a rough ink and watercolor style, gives the game a good "Alaskan wilderness" atmosphere.
The idea of the game is a very straightforward race between Anchorage and Nome in dogsleds. The five boards are laid out side by side in a line, with three paths leading from the start city to the finish, and plenty of chances to switch paths along the way. The boards are designed to be modular, so you can remove some of the ones in between for a shorter game. Generally on each board one path will be longer, another shorter, and one in between, but the shorter path has more mountain spaces to go through, and the longest path has the least mountains, or sometimes none.
A game starts with each player choosing how to train his sled dogs: either for warm, moderate, or cold weather. However, there are strict limits on how many players can choose a particular type of training, so there is always a variety of training in the game, and the last player has no choice. Each player starts with twenty action chips, a sled board and playing piece in matching colors, a token to mark warm, moderate, or cold weather training, another token to mark current weather conditions, and eight small white chips to cover up the eight sled dogs when they become exhausted. The game is played in rounds, with each player having one turn to move each round. In each round, first the players bid action chips for the chance to go first. Whoever goes first then gets a free one-space move before the die is rolled to determine current weather conditions. Each player then takes a turn in order, starting with the first player. First the player looks to see how many healthy (uncovered) dogs there are on his sled card. This is how many dog dice he may roll. Then he looks at the current weather conditions and how his dogs are trained. If they are the same, he uses the green dog dice. If they are one space apart (cold-moderate, or moderate-warm) he uses the red dog dice, and if they are two spaces apart (cold-warm) he uses the blue dog dice. Each die rolled can either come up with a picture of a dog or a blank face. The green dice have four dogs and two blank faces, reds have three and three, and the blue dog dice have two dogs and four blank faces. For each dog rolled, the player can move one space. After moving, the player has one more exhausted dog, so one dog is covered by a white chip. Then, if his training matches the current weather, he may try to press one or two spaces further by rolling a die and consulting a chart. However, this is dangerous, since it may possibly exhaust one more dog without moving him any further. After each player has had a turn, the round is over and another begins.
There are cities along the way where you can rest your dogs and earn more action chips. Of course you may rest in the wilderness, too, but for each turn spent resting in the wilderness you only uncover one dog, whereas if you rest in a city you will recuperate two or three dogs at a time, depending on the city. You can also gain action chips by resting, and these are handy for more than just bidding to go first. Firstly, there are the mountains (rough terrain). In order to get into a mountain space, you must roll a four or higher on the normal (one to six) die. If you fail your roll, you don't get into the space and your turn ends. But before you roll you can spend one or two chips to add one or two to your die roll. Then there is the fact that no two pieces can occupy the same space on the board, and it costs four chips to step over another piece. And you can spend three chips to reroll all of your dog dice if you didn't like the first roll, or you can spend three chips to force another player to reroll his dog dice. You can spend two chips to remove one dog die from an opponent's roll, or spend five to move the avalanche (which starts the game off of the board) in front of an opponent. (You must roll a six to cross the avalanche, but you can spend chips to help your die roll, like the rough terrain spaces.) The first sled to get to Nome wins.
The dynamics of the game work very well. Unlike most "race to the finish line" games, there are plenty of difficult choices to make. When do you rest, and for how long? How and when do you use your action chips? Do you take the short path through the mountains, or go around? Do you detour to the nearest city or push on toward the finish line? Is it worth the chips to go first? Is it worth the risk to try to press?
I especially like the "exhausted dog" mechanism. This makes it important to pace yourself, and seek out the cities along the way. You can trade a turn or two of moving for the ability to move more quickly in future turns. The decision of how to train your dogs is very important, too. The weather chart you use depends on the position of whichever sled is in the lead. The first two boards are weighted heavily toward warm weather (four times as likely as either of the other types), while the last two boards are weighted just as heavily toward cold weather. The middle board gives an equal chance to warm, moderate, and cold weather. It may seem like this means that moderate weather training would be suicide, and it is true that moderate weather comes up very rarely. But the moderate trainer will never have to roll those terrible blue dice, so he is guaranteed at least a fifty-fifty chance of getting a dog with each die he rolls throughout the game. It's true that he will not be able to press very often, but pressing is risky anyway. Between warm and cold weather training, I first thought that cold would be the obvious best choice, but now I'm not so sure. With the weather depending on the leading sled, cold weather is rolled slightly more often during an average game than warm. And with the warm-weather trainer having an advantage at the beginning of the game, he will be picked on more often than the cold-weather trainer. But the cold-weather team has its advantage at the end of the game, when the players usually have only a few healthy dogs left. The warm-weather team has its advantage at the beginning of the game, so they will often roll six, seven, or eight green dice at a time. It's a tough decision.
The only problem I have with the game concerns the rough terrain spaces. Unlike avalanches, which you can spend chips to move, these are permanent parts of the board, and you can't spend three chips to make getting into a rough terrain space automatic. I can understand why this rule was made, because otherwise a person could save up enough chips to make a run for it on the shortest path, effectively ignoring all terrain in front of him since he can pay to go through anything. But it also means that a series of bad rolls (and it isn't too improbable to roll three or four ones in a row) can effectively take a person out of the race. In fact this happened to BOTH of my opponents in one game, making that game quite unsatisfying. I would suggest that, on the turn after a player has failed to enter a mountain space because of a die roll, he be allowed to spend three chips to get into THAT SPACE ONLY. Still, in spite of this one problem that happened to come up, the game is very enjoyable. It is true that so far nobody has spent any chips to reduce the dog dice of another player, and the avalanches sometimes don't even get on the board. We seem to prefer saving our chips for rough terrain, rerolling dog dice, getting the early riser bonus, and jumping over other players. But I can see that in five or six player games it may be more common that several players would spend their chips to hamstring the leader, so that they may catch up.
Mush is entertaining and engrossing, a credit to Alan Moon, and a welcome addition to the White Wind line. There is just enough complexity to keep the game interesting, yet the mechanics don't detract from or interfere with the flow of the game. The game length is variable, depending on the number of boards used (although I would reccommend starting with less action chips when there are less boards: four chips less for each board removed would be good...), so you can play a long or short game as your situation dictates, and still end up with an exciting race across Alaska. So hitch up your huskies and have fun!