1 – 4 players.
play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Logged plays: 2
Merry … late Christmas. I got you some reviews; I hope that’s what you wanted. Are they about holiday-themed games? No. Do they even have snow in them? … Also no. I am not even entirely sure I have holiday-themed games. Maybe Festival? Worth considering for next week; I do love reviewing a fireworks-themed game around the new year. We’ll see what I get around to. In the meantime, though, help yourself to some games I picked up at PAX Unplugged! Probably my favorite show of the year, largely because the weather is so agreeable and very cold. That is how I like it.
In Newsboys, players are up-and-coming enterprising youths with the classic job of … youth: the paper route! However, you’re more than heroes: you’re union men. You’re not afraid to go on strike and take collective action to get your needs met, particularly when it comes to rising wages. Just keep in mind that every Newsboy is out to make a buck, and that means you gotta keep growing your subscription area while you’re raising your wages. So easy to balance those two things. Will you be able to survive as a paper boy? Or will you just end up being a paper tiger?
Contents
Setup
Very little. Give each player a board:
Give each player a set of three dice.
The cards should be shuffled and set into a stack (single icon side up). Place the End card on the bottom of the deck, and then place the top card of the deck on the bottom.
You should be ready to start! Give each player a pen.
Gameplay
There’s a few moving parts in this one, but once you get the hang of things it all flows together nicely. Your goal is to make the most money by expanding your newspaper sales area and balancing that against the occasional strike to keep your wages up by payday. Once the game ends, the player with the most points wins!
To start a round, all players roll their dice, and one player flips the top card of the deck over. Between the now face-up card and the top card of the deck, there are three icons. Those and the three icons on your specific dice form your pool for the round. From your pool, you can pick any one icon type (or, if you have any ? dice, any one icon type that isn’t present in your pool). You can make one X per icon of the type you choose either on your player board or on your Strike Gauge (but not both).
When marking off your player board, you may only make Xs in one zone of the same type as your chosen icon type (and Xs can only be placed adjacent to other Xs). If you have more than will fit in the zone, they’re wasted. If you exactly fill the zone, you earn a Referral! That’s one bonus X that can be placed in any zone or on your Strike Gauge. Referrals can be chained! If you use a Referral to complete a zone, you get another one, and so on. The last space in a zone to be completed must be the space with the icon; you can’t fill it out until the others are filled. When you complete a zone, Referral or not, cross off the corresponding icon on the bottom-left of your board. Completing a row earns you points! Completing a column earns you points too!
Filling out your Strike Gauge is much simpler; just cross off the left-most open space for each X.
There is a racing element to this! Completing a row, column, or zone first means you get more points than other players who complete it later. Completing the second and third column, however, activates a Payday! Payday means that you count the number of Salary Icons you’ve crossed off and compare them to the rightmost crossed-off number on your Strike Gauge. Take the lower value and that’s how much you score for your Payday!
Once everyone’s crossed off their icons, you collectively announce what you’ve gotten this round. That way, you don’t let players know you’re completing a zone before you do. Sneakier that way.
play continues until either one player completes two Color Bonuses (rows of the same icon) or the End card is revealed. Once that happens, total your points, and the player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Pretty much none. The racing element does mean that you run the risk of lower scores across the board if players all manage to move in different directions, but honestly, that’s relatively unlikely; different board setups and different dice rolls and et cetera means that all that variance might effectively cancel out. We found that, even at lower player counts, players might gravitate back towards the same areas. The racing element is important, granted, but it’s not going to get too too mixed up with more players. You really can’t get to everything in one game anyways. Just pick a direction and go for it. I wouldn’t say, as a result, I have a strong player count preference for this one.
Strategy
- Watch out for someone bum-rushing the end of the game! My bud Bonnie got me with this one once, and so let that be a warning to you! Players can rush the end of the game and potentially outscore you if you’re playing a long game. It could happen to you! Just try to be aware of where everyone is, game-wise.
- In general, try to keep an eye on other players’ boards. It really helps knowing how close they are to things that you want, like scoring certain Zones or rows or columns. Naturally, they may not be super receptive to this, and if that’s the case, you know, be surreptitious about it. Or, at least, don’t delay the game by demanding to see everyone’s board so that you can plan your strategy accordingly. That’s annoying! Treat it like Goldeneye 007 for the N64, where anyone who said they weren’t looking at other players’ screens was a liar. TVs weren’t that big.
- Going a bit wide early on can expand your footprint of where you can possibly go, which can help you utilize your dice to the max. Just driving through the map real fast means you can branch out to different zones, making the most of what you roll. It’s not great to roll two Greens if the two-Green zone isn’t accessible (though it can help you set up a three-Green zone for later).
- Setting yourself up for Referrals is clutch. Ideally, you’d be able to cross off a few zones by chaining up a few Referrals so that you could knock out an entire sector of the board. It’s unlikely, but it’s worth doing if you roll two of some icon; just get down to one open space left.
- Go after some Salary spots so that you can boost one end of your Payday output. Salary spots are the spots on the board with a symbol and a money sign; they’ll boost your salary so that when you get a Payday that number is compared to your Strike Gauge value and you get the lower one. Ideally, they would increase at the same (or a similar) pace.
- I think if you ever get four or five of the same icon it almost always makes sense to fill up your Strike Gauge with it. I have yet to see a circumstance where it doesn’t, though there’s plenty of wiggle room around when to use twos or threes on the Strike Gauge. If you get a five or a six, though, obviously, Strike Gauge with that. You need to fill that up pretty quickly.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Cute theme. I haven’t played a lot of newspaper route-themed board games since, like, Payday back in my youth? I was delighted to see this one and in the charming art style I always see from Saashi & Saashi titles. I’m not sure what I like about it but the people always look so friendly.
- Surprisingly simple to set up and play. I mean, you can read the Setup section; it’s pretty short. Even the turns aren’t long since you’re just drawing a few Xs and occasionally resolving some stuff.
- I really like the way icons are doled out to players; it gives some player-specific differences on each roll, which makes my experience feel distinct from other players’. There’s a bit for everyone and a bit for you and how they interact can make your turns interesting (even if it relies on the dice a lot to make things work).
- Pretty portable, which is also nice. Small boxes! You love to see it, though given how difficult these specific games can be to replace I might be loathe to take them places with me. We’ll see if Saashi & Saashi come to PAX Unplugged next year, though hopefully given how thoroughly they sold out on like, the first day, that will happen.
- The boards having different color combinations for each zone is nice, too; prevents people from just doing the exact same thing (along with the dice). Ironically, they might end up doing similar things, since, I don’t know, this seems to shake out in weird ways sometimes. But that’s half the fun! I just like switching boards every so often anyways; it nicely averts that occasional complaint that one board is “better”, which is silly.
- The blue of the box is also really striking! It stands out really well. Love a cobalt blue; it just looks nice and it’s relatively uncommon, so it’s always nice to see.
Mehs
- I wish the board were a bit larger, just for precision marking. The Strike Gauge is pretty small. The one challenge about small boxes, I suppose. It means the cards and the board are both pretty small.
Cons
- The game can end a bit abruptly, which can sometimes feel pretty bad. I always like there being a “one more round” if the game end is activated, and while that works with the End card appearing, the Color Bonus happens and the game ends. It can feel a bit yucky as a player.
- There’s a pretty substantial luck element to this, just in that a player can fairly consistently out-roll you (by getting more icons of a type on each roll than you). If someone’s consistently getting three icons of a type and you’re consistently getting two, they’re likely going to win since they are placing 50% more icons per turn than you. Thankfully, random chance should amortize that out a bit, but sometimes that’s not how things go and that can feel a bit annoying since you’re just consistently behind another player. Thankfully, games are short, so that doesn’t matter for very long.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I think Newsboys is a delight! Despite the rulebook being a bit in-depth on your first go-about, the game is very approachable with some fun spins on combining roll-and-write games with flip-and-write games for a game that plays nicely with both genres. I used “game” too many times in that sentence and now, unfortunately, it’s lost all meaning to me. It happens. The core of the game is very interesting, as you have to balance the desire to expand to as many areas as possible with the need to make sure that you’re actually getting paid for your work. It’s hard to thread that needle, and plenty of players will mess that up in their first game and find that out the hard way when they get 2 or fewer points from their first Payday. Politely, however, the game only takes about 20 minutes, so it’s very easy to come back from. It’s an even faster game when someone bum-rushes the end and focuses on filling out two entire colors as fast as possible, so watch out for that and make sure you’ve got something in the works to counter it. That will probably come up once or twice, as these things tend to. But, all that said, this is another winner from one of my favorite publishers. Saashi & Saashi generally have a great track record of putting out games that are fun, interesting, or challenging in ways I didn’t necessarily expect, and while this is one of their lighter titles outside of their small card games, it’s no less strategic or fun than anything else I’ve played from them. I feel like I could play this with anyone, which also helps a lot for its appeal. If you’re looking for a fun roll-and-write, you want to relive the glory days of your paper route, or you’re feeling a flip-and-write that’s a little different, check out Newsboys! I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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