Easy Come, Easy Go builds on the same game concept that any player who has played Yahtzee or other dice games will be familiar with. Reiner Knizia fans may also be familiar with Pickomino or Age of War/Risk Express. These are all dice games where players try to roll different combinations of dice in a limited number of turns in order to ‘score’. Think of classic poker and/or dice combinations such as ‘four of a kind’, ’two pairs’, ‘straights’ and exact numbers or certain values. In both Easy Come, Easy Go, Pickomino and Age of War, players roll dice combinations to win or steal cards or tiles. A brief comparison between these games follows later in the review. First up: Easy Come, Easy Go.
Nine beautifully designed tiles are placed in the centre of the table. Each tile represents a ship in a bottle, and each sail clearly shows which combination a player must roll to win or steal the tile from another player. Each turn, the active player rolls all four dice to make combinations. The four dice depict the numbers 0-5. Each time the active player has rolled, this player may claim a ship if the player has rolled the matching combination or this player rolls again.
Each time a player re-rolls, this player must first set aside at least one die. Set-aside dice are not thrown again. A player thus has a maximum of four throws to get a combination. Players may win ships from the middle of the table for themselves, or steal ships that other players have won. Some combinations are more difficult to cast, so it pays to take risks in the hope of getting a difficult ship, so the chance of piracy is more difficult.
Once a player has won a third ship, the other players or the other players have two more turns to steal a ship, and otherwise the player who has survived two turns with at least three ships wins!
Easy Come, Easy Go! is a simple dice game that, as described earlier, is somewhat similar to Pickomino and Age of War, as all three are games designed by Reiner Knizia in which players roll dice combinations to win tiles or cards. Each game contains a different composition of dice and all three games have slightly different rules regarding dice rolling and dice storage, but the basic principles are the same. In Pickomino the combinations are basically always a sum, this makes this game the simplest in nature and as a result also has a simple scoring mechanism. Age of War is by far the most complex game of the three. Players already have to assign their dice during the first roll to a particular card. In Age of War, players have to plan most and make the right choices to mitigate their luck.
Easy Come, Easy Go is fixed right in between the aforementioned games in terms of complexity. The combinations players cast are more varied than those in Pickomino and this presents players with fun choices, but luck plays a bigger role than in Age of War. This makes Easy Come, Easy Go! a funny and short dice game that can easily be played within 15 minutes. The design of this edition is beautifully done and a fun challenge for novice players!
