The game ends after as many rounds as the number of players (each player will be the Catcher once). Count the victory points from your fish cards and the player with the highest total of victory points becomes the winner! Don't forget to also count your revealed ones! It’s a more mentally taxing take on the original game’s premise, but unfortunately it doesn’t take long for this edition to come off the rails. The requirement to collect different cards means that you can spend several turns fishing for the ones you need before you’re actually able to do anything, and it soon becomes frustrating. Rails and Sails adds length and complexity, but it offers little new in terms of gameplay.

Even the box is a work of genius. Brian Gomez and Brain Games have designed a ‘boxes-within-boxes’ creation – the various rooms that help construct the icy arena all sit snug within each other in the main box. Each one is a few millimetres narrower than its predecessor, so they sit like Russian dolls. Rooms are clipped together on your table with wooden fish pegs, which is a neat touch. It quite literally is a big game in a modest-sized box (and it can be combined with ICE COOL 2 to make a humongous layout). The game is over when every player has been the Catcher once. The player with the most victory points is declared the winner! As a bonus, a player can reveal 2 “1 point” victory point cards on their turn to immediately take a second turn. If there is one genre that I can’t get enough of it’s card drafting games. But if there is a second genre that I am addicted to, it’d have to be dexterity games. I love them. I think it’s because they always feel so unique when you compare them to each other. That and they are usually the genre of games that seems to inspire the most talked about moments. That one amazing shot will always create a lasting memory.If the Runner completely goes through a door with a fish token of his color on it, he takes it and draws the top card from the fish card draw pile. You look at the card and put it face down partly covering your color reminder card. In each round one of the players takes the role of the Hall Monitor – his aim is to catch each other penguin. The others, however, will try to run through several doors, thus gaining fish on their way. When either the Hall Monitor has caught each other penguin once or any of the others have gone through all of the doors that have fish on them, the round is over. Each player will take the role of the Hall Monitor once and at the end of the game the winner will be the one with the most points on their fish cards. I think though that it’s likely to be an issue with vanishingly small relevance – I don’t doubt people can become Ice Cool masters if they want, I just suspect most people won’t want to. While mismatched skill levels are likely to be common, they’re not likely to be mismatched enough to trigger the problems relevant to this category. We still can’t offer a recommendation for Ice Cool in this category, but if there was a dexterity game we thought could be fun for those with physical accessibility needs it would be this one. Socioeconomic Accessibility As with our section on visual accessibility this is about as accessibile a dexterity game as we can imagine. The fixed constraints, the walls, and the nature of play all mean that while physicality is an issue the design mitigates for a lot of minor impairments that would otherwise render a game unplayable. However, this is not a design space in which even being ‘the most accessible’ is much commendation. This is a category of games, wall to wall, that is likely to be inaccessible if physical accessibility issues must be considered.

This is a game that I think only works if everyone is equally bad. I won’t even say equally capable, because I don’t think this is likely to be a fun game if competence can be assumed. One of the things we talk about here on Meeple Like Us is accessibility – you may have noticed. One of the features of accessibility in the area of games is that sometimes the inaccessibility is where you find the fun. Warnng, video below is NSFW: The artwork on the game boxes is also expertly done. The school-house has a lot of nice, thematic touches to really help to bring the theme home. The ID cards are also dual sided, with a male or female avatar on each side. The VP cards come in denominations of 1, 2 or 3 and depict increasingly larger plates of fish. Each Runner attaches one of their fish tokens on each of the three doors marked with the fish symbol. The round ends when either one truant penguin has collected all their fish, or when the hall monitor has confiscated all the hall passes. Then fish are returned to the starting set-up, a different player becomes the hall monitor and everyone plays again. (Everyone will have one round of being the hall monitor.) Whoever collects the highest total of fish on their cards wins the game. Ice Cool 2 is a standalone expansion, meaning you can play the expansion without needing the base game (although its way better if you do have the base game, more on that later). The components in Ice Cool 2 are nearly identical to the original. There are 4 penguins and matching fish in different colors from the original. The cards have gotten a bit of an upgrade with the addition of tasks on the 1 value cards. A player can also use two value 2 cards to move any fish to a new doorway. The box setup is also very similar, being a mirrored version of the original. Finally, the rulebook has gotten a bit of an upgrade and is much clearer now.

The Story

The components in Ice Cool are nothing short of fantastic. The biggest draw of the game has to be Brain Game’s “box in a box” system. The game board is made up of 5 boxes that link together to form the penguin school-house. The great thing about these is that the boxes nest when not in use, so the whole game fits into one normal sized game box. If the Catcher at any point during his turn touches one or more Runners, he takes away their ID cards.

Double the rooms mean more variety of size and configuration. The instructions for IceCool2 include suggested layouts for different games. Some even use unsecured rooms in the middle that can slide into different positions. And some result in open exits, which can be another source of amusement. Alternatively, you can use the box lids to seal them off.

Object of the Game

We’ll strongly recommend Ice Cool here because the big problem is likely to be something you don’t encounter, and the smaller problem of score randomness can be solved by simply counting accomplishment rather than the face value of cards. Physical Accessibility

The round ends when either a runner has collected all their fish, or the catcher has collected all the other player’s ID cards. At that point, each players draws a VP card for each ID card they currently have in their possession.

Rules Changes For 2 Players

Given how competitive some of us are (sibling rivalries, anyone?), you can imagine how ICE COOL can – and will – become the smash hit of the evening at your games night. I encountered two problems with the combined game. On some layouts, the joins could do with a firmer hold and often there is a misalignment of doorways. The latter results in smaller openings that increase the difficulty. Neither of these are major issues. I even came to appreciate doorways of varying challenge. What use is Maths when you could have the easy life you see the other penguins having when you watch David Attenborough on TV? Cutting class is so much more fun and there’s plenty of fish to be had in the kitchens, so long as the hall monitor doesn’t catch you! Ice Cool is a stupid amount of fun. Not since Coconuts has there been a dexterity game that blew our expectations out of the water. We played this game a ton of times at Gen Con 2016 and the amount of cheering and laughter that erupted while playing this game was unreal. We always seemed to be drawing a crowd of onlookers as people walked by. The game consists of as many rounds as there are players (except in a 2 player game). In each round one player is the Catcher and the other players are the Runners. Each round consists of 3 phases: Phase 1 - Round Setup