Hey That's My Fish Board Game

Product Information

Hey, That’s My Fish! is a game for 2-4 players from Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). Players take turns using their waddle of penguins to outmanoeuvre their opponents and catch as many fish as they can without being trapped on an ice floe! This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. The biggest surprise was the size of the components. The box is roughly 12 x 12 x 2 inches, which would suggest it is an average sized game. But the inside of the box contains an insert which divides the box into roughly three equal sections. All the components fit into the center third of the box.

As the game progresses, the available landing points diminish as more and more ice floes disappear from the board. If you’re ever cut off from the main board, you’ll gain the fish on the island of ice floes, but that penguin is out of the game. A three-player game after three moves.The game is simplicity itself to play and takes seconds to set up, in fact it took me longer to get the box open than it did to set the first game up! A brilliantly simple and devilishly complex game which will lose you countless hours of your life for a small amount. 9/10 Players then start the game by placing their colored penguins on ice floes containing only one fish until all penguins are on the board. I admit that it can be a bit fiddly trying to get the ice floe tiles from the centre of the board, however it’s easy to fix if you mess it up a little whilst taking your starting tile. This is an older game that has recently received a reprint by Fantasy Flight Games. And by this you can be sure of one thing: great components! They have tokens for everything and plastic molds of other things that aren’t really needed. And now with a reprint of Hey, that’s my fish, it just proves my point further.

Each player chooses a penguin color and takes the appropriate number of penguins of that color, depending on the number of players. Set up involves laying the 60 ice floe tiles in rows creating “the board”. Then each player takes a turn placing their penguins on the tiles. After everyone’s penguins are placed, players take turns moving 1 penguin at a time in a straight line through the hex shaped ice floe tiles. Tiles are removed in each penguin’s wake leaving gaps as each player advances. Players can move their penguins as far as they want until they run into an opposing penguin or a gap in the ice floe. Then they are forced to stop. Even though it is a simple game there is still an air of strategy to it for more experienced board gamers. You do have to think ahead a few turns and hope that your opponents aren’t going for the same tile you are!The smallish tiles make keeping the game neat and tidy a chore. This is a rare instance where a digital version could be an improvement over the tabletop, and here is why. The “board” is continually changing, as players move their pawns and remove the tiles they claim. An electronic version would eliminate the unwanted shifting in the tiles. During this step, the player takes the ice floe tile the penguin started its move from and adds the tile to his collection (placing the tile faceup in a pile in front of himself). Collecting Ice Floes Hey, That’s My Fish! is such a simple yet elegant game to play. The rules are detailed and easy to understand. During set-up you can explain what the rules are, so that you can play in minutes! Who doesn’t want to start a game night with something that can be explained in less than a minute! My only real criticism of the tabletop version of Hey, That’s My Fish was managing the ever shifting hexagon tiles that make up the board. The Android app solves that problem beautifully. There is no setup or cleanup time, and there are many options to keep things fun. One to four human players can play against each other, provided they share a device, or play a computer opponent. The program is quite intuitive, and the rules and goals of the game are clear. The penguins themselves are brilliant! Quite small but well sculpted, molded in an assortment of amusing poses (my favourite being the one raging into the sky!)

The design is simple and effective, but one frustrating aspect of the game is that players are required to remove tiles as they claim them. Often these tile are interior tiles, and they require care in lifting them without upsetting the other tiles. Consult The Google for variations—my personal one is a large hex with the center hex/ice flow missing. My starting board of choice. The open hex in the center gives players a hint of what’s to come and also keeps someone from moving from one corner of the board to another. The penguin can only move onto unoccupied ice floes. It cannot move onto or through floes occupied by another penguin (even one of its own color) or spaces without ice floes. Penguin MovementThe biggest problem with the set up is that it is kind of hard to try and evenly distribute the two and three fish tiles. While you could take the time to truly distribute the tiles, that would take way too long so you need to just try to make it as balanced as possible. You need to take enough time distributing the tiles though or one player could end up with a huge advantage.

The rules are so simple that a full group of four were taught the rules before turn two of the first game and were penguin strategists extraordinaire by the third! Sometimes, though, that abstract nature has the thinnest of veneers applied to it. Consider Chess, a game with Kings, Queens, Knights, and Bishops. Those names give the game a regal feel, but the pieces could just as easily be named Rectangle, Octagon, and Triangle. None of the timeless feel of the game would be lost. The delightfully small box for Hey, That’s My Fish!Since it was recently re-released by Fantasy Flight, I decided to take a look at the 2005 game Hey! That’s My Fish! In Hey! That’s My Fish! you play as a group of penguins that are trying to hoard all of the fish for themselves instead of sharing them with the other penguins. Those greedy little penguins. Despite appearing to be simple, Hey! That’s My Fish has a lot more strategy hiding beneath the surface than you would expect.