Bucket Brigade

Bucket Brigade - another rather gently competitive game from the profitably playful mind of Renier Knizia - is a horse race game you play basically with cards, a scoreboard and wooden firepeople.

There are only 4 wooden firepeople - a red one, a green one, a blue one and a yellow one - even though 3 or up to 5 humanpeople can play. Each wooden fireperson is a different color. There are also 55 cards. There are cards with red firepeople and cards with blue firepeople, and there are cards with firepeople who are walking and worth one step, and there are cards with firepeople who are walking and worth one step and firepeople who are running and worth. So, if you play a walking red firperson, the red wooden fireperson goes one step higher (one space further) on the ladder-looking scoreboard. And the higher you make a fireperson of certain color go, the higher the worth of the firepeople of the same color depicted on your cards. Totally tally is not taken, however, until one fireperson makes it to the top of the conceptual ladder.

Thus, you see, you're not racing to get a wooden fireperson to the top as much as you're racing to make the firepeople on your cards worth more. Simple enough? Yeah. But kind of fascinating. You wanting the yellow wooden fireperson to get to the space that makes all the yellow card firepeople worth three times as much, her rooting for the blue wooden fireperson.

Kind a like those horse racing games. But different. Easier to play. More fun for the family. Gently competitive. Moderately strategic. Major FUN.

From Face2Face.