First Snow (2017)

Overview

First Snow is a free Print&Play game about an Inuit wandering through the changing landscape, hunting for food, gathering wood, building simple tools and looking for the best shelter to keep himself warm. This gets more and more difficult as the winter swiftly approaches. And on top of all that, there’s this big terrifying polar bear…

The game uses an innovative worker placement mechanism combined with resource management and a bit of bluffing. It uses dice in a few interesting ways but none of them require you to roll them. ;-)

GAMEPLAY

Every round players build a new landscape out of the 6 double sided land cards. As they do, they place their two camps along the way. Numbers on the chosen land cards determine the player order for the next round.

Every land card is divided in half, so you do not choose a single card, but you have to combine two of them to form the complete location for your camp.

At the start of the round, players secretly send their polar bear to one of the land cards and since you try to avoid the bear and want to get the best card at the same time, it brings a small bluffing aspect to the game.

After completing the landscape, players resolve their camps. One of the camps serve as a "day camp" and the other as a "night camp" and each of them has a bit different purpose.

While resolving a camp you can use all the resources shown on its location, but you have to fit them into your inventory to be able to use them later in the game. You can even build useful tools, but they take up space in your inventory as well. Scoring is resolved every round in your night camp and consists of feeding your Inuit and keeping him warm.

The land cards serve also as a timer. One of them is flipped "winter" side up every round and the game ends when all the land cards get flipped.

The game was designed for the 2017 9-Card Nanogame P&P Design Contest and it achieved the following awards:

1st place - Best Overall Game

1st Place - Best 2 player Game 1st place - Best Thematic Game 1st place - Best Written Rules 1st place - Best Artwork 2nd place - Most Innovative Mechanic