Save Your Goats and Send Your Opponents Out to Sea in Floats McGoats

The ship has crashed, there are goats everywhere! Build a life raft and get your goats on there as quickly as possible, even if it means sending a shark after your opponents.

Published by Hootenanny Games, Floats McGoats is a 15-30 minute board game, designed for 2-4 players, that is filled with lots of goats!

Gameplay

The board shows a grid of triangles. In the center of the board you place the two dark anchor sticks. Each player takes goats in their player color, one of which will be a baby goat while the rest are mama goats.

On your turn, you have two choices: either place a goat or roll the die. When you place a goat, you must place it on an empty triangle that is adjacent to at least one stick. When you roll the die, you must resolve the action you roll, and there are a number of possible actions. You can add a stick, in which case you take one stick and place it, light side up, along one of the empty triangle patterns on the grid; it must also touch one end of a stick already on the board. Another possibility is the add or move action, in which case you either add a stick, as in the first action, or you may move any stick that is light side up on the board and to any other location on the board that follows the stick placement rules. If, when a stick is moved, a goat is no longer adjacent to a stick or his section of the raft is no longer connected to the two starting anchor sticks, then the goat and sticks are removed from the board and the goat is returned to its player’s goat supply.

There is also the move two sticks action, as well as the flip a stick action. When you flip a stick, you turn it from its light side to its dark side. If a goat is surrounded on all three sides by dark sticks, that goat can no longer be affected by actions from the die. A stick showing its dark side cannot be moved or flipped back for the rest of the game (although it can be removed from the board if it loses connection to the anchor sticks).

Another action is goat love. When fulfilling this action, you may take one of your goats and place it on top of on of your other goats; you can only have a stack of two goats. The shark action allows you to move the shark token to a triangle space on the board with a goat. The goat is returned to its player’s supply and you can choose to move one of your own goats from anywhere on the board to the space the shark just left.

Finally, there is the goat fight action. When you roll this, you choose one of your goats on the board and swap its location with an opponent’s. Mama goats can only swap with other mama goats and baby goats can only swap with other baby goats. If you have a stack of two goats it can swap with any other goat or stack except a baby goat by itself.

If you roll the action die and cannot perform the action rolled, you add a stick to the board.

In order for a goat to be worth points, it must be surrounded on all three triangle sides by sticks (these sticks can either be light or dark side face-up). A mama goat is worth one point and a baby goat is worth two.

Review

Floats McGoats has a lot of take-that, back and forth, jostling for prime positions on the raft that are safer than others, remembering who sent the shark after who so you can return the favor, and trying to get your goats on the board as quickly as possible. There is a lot of player interaction, and each point is a challenge to hold onto, until you can start locking sticks into place.

It’s fun when you can set it up so that multiple opponents have their goats get cut off from the raft, and the board is constantly evolving every turn. There’s definitely a lot of luck of the roll in the game, and the more players you have the more chaos there is going to be. But the slow creep of more and more of the raft becoming safe gives each game a nice evolution, while ensuring it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The game looks colorful. The goats and die are all nice and chunky. The rules explicitly state that the raft can be built out beyond the confines of the board, so it's rather fun to watch it take shape, and the more players, the more it is going to be built out. Player aids would be handy, just to remind players of some of the details of actions as they’re learning the game, but it’s a pretty easy game to get the hang of.

It can be a little fiddly to flip over the sticks when they’re in the middle of the board, surrounded by goats and raft. If someone has dexterity issues this could be a problem. Although it does help to pick up a goat or two to clear the space, you just have to be sure to replace them correctly.

Floats McGoats is fun, light, colorful, and plays at a nice pace. There is a good bit of luck — sometimes you just don't roll that one action you really need — but placing sticks is always the most likely result, so you have to balance between hoping for certain actions and placing lots of goats. The result is a fun, light game, with a quirky theme that fits the gameplay well.

Pros: Components and aesthetics, speed of game, lots of player interaction

Cons: Amount of luck could frustrate some players when paired with take-that, flipping sticks can be a little fiddly

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of these games.