Asymmetric sheep

I've just had a couple of plays of brand new, hot-off-the-press game, Te Kuiti, which one of the designers sent us to have a look at on Training a Gamer.  Expect a report there in the near future, but as a quick summary, we enjoyed it.

Box art nobbled from BoardGameGeek.com

From a game design perspective, though, the game is very interesting.  It effectively takes two very old traditional games (card matching game Memory, and the pencil and paper game Boxes) and mashes them together into a bizarre, asymmetric conglomeration.  So this actually hits two of my current interests: asymmetry and repurposing old and unloved (by "gamers") games.

I was recently moaning about the difficulty of designing asymmetrical games and making them satisfyingly balanced, but Te Kuiti is a classic example of a different approach: you make the game quick enough that players want to play at least twice, once each way, and then aggregate the scores across two plays.  Keep It Simple, Stupid!