I spent a large part of my childhood playing carrom very badly. Despite that, I still have a soft spot for dexterity games because they seem to me to be the best of both worlds — they retail the social aspect that makes board gaming so compelling, and they shift focus away from the purely mental arena of most games into the realm of the physical. You see, when you introduce a dexterity element into a game, you’re also creating the potential for both the most jaw-dropping triumphs and the most cataclysmic fails. And few do both as well as Ice Cool.
In Ice Cool, you and up to three other people will play as young penguins attending a...high school. (Finish groaning, I’ll wait.) Every round, three of you will decide to skip class and wander around the school, trying to grab some delicious fish. However, the last penguin will take the role of the hall monitor, whose job it is to catch any truant penguins and...confiscate their ID cards (seems legit).
All of this is accomplished by flicking your little penguin figures around the 3D representation of the school (more on this later), but that doesn’t quite convey how much fun that is. Each penguin figure is weighted near the bottom, and tends to wobble quite substantially — which, in practical terms, means that they’re not only far more chaotic to flick than a carrom striker, for example, but that also opens up the possibility of highly-skillful shots.
For example, flick a penguin just right and you can curve around corners and/or other penguins to get to where you need to go; it’s not easy, but you will feel superhuman when you manage to pull it off. And that’s not all — you can even jump penguins over walls, which can get you out of the trickiest situations in theory. So three of you will be trying to flick your way through doorways marked with fish, while the hall monitor’s just trying to knock his penguin into each of the others and get their ID cards. Based on your success, you’ll draw fish cards that are the actual points you score; but honestly, this is one of those games where you’ll care more about landing an impossible trickshot than about who wound up winning.
It’s also necessary to give due credit to whoever came up with the concept for the ‘board’ of Ice Cool, because the school is made up of six differently-sized boxes that nest together to create the box of the game itself. This is an absolutely genius concept, and creates the perfect environment for a game like this.
Earlier this year, Ice Cool won the Kinderspiel des Jahres (or the children’s game of the year), which is both a testament to its quality and yet does it a disservice. I’ve only ever played this game with adults, and it’s been a blast every time. If you ever enjoyed carrom or any other flicking game at some point in your life, this is as close to a no-brainer as you’ll ever come across.
Arjun Sukumaran
http://goo.gl/uNBWN3
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)