Booted! (Saturday Review)

The goal is super simple. Get all of your four pawns from one end of the nine-by-nine grid to the other. It seems like a long way and as your opponent has the same goal, you need to be clever and outmanoeuvre them. Choose the right card to move your pawns in a pattern that allows you to get around your opponent’s pawns and get closer to your goal. However, if you’re not careful, one of your pawns will get knocked out. If this happens too many times, you will be Booted! by Karissa Tang and Skyden Tang.

You will probably know checkers, where your pieces move diagonally and can jump over the opponent’s pieces to knock them out of the game. Your goal is to take out all of your opponent’s discs and be the only player with pieces left on the board. In chess, your pieces move in various ways and your goal is to take out the opponent’s king. Booted! takes both of these ideas in a slightly different direction. Your goal is to get your four pawns to the other end, avoiding your opponent’s pieces or kicking them back to the beginning. How your pawns move is decided by the cards in your hand.

As an abstract two-player game, Booted! was specifically designed to be very easy to learn and quick to play, while teaching players strategic and tactical thinking. The game has now been donated to 120 schools across all 50 states of the United States, showing how great of a teaching aid it is, while also being a quick, fun game for two players.

Short, but not Sweet

It took 5 minutes to explain the game using the rules video. The printed rulebook misses a couple of the finer points. For example, they don’t say that players draw another movement card after playing one. So check out the video and you’re off to the best start. In fact, if you watch the video, there is no need to read the rulebook.

The game itself consists of a nine-by-nine checkered grid, eight pawns, four for each of the two colours and 52 movement cards. It’s all very simple and straightforward. No fancy custom tokens, linen finish or anything else. Booted! reminds me very much of the sort of game components you used to get in game collections when I grew up. You know the one, where you get chess on one side, checkers on the other, with lots of plastic pieces and maybe even some dice and a dice cup. Cheap and cheerful, but you don’t need anything else.

Learning to play Booted! is as quick as playing it. There isn’t really too much to worry about. Choose one of the movement cards from your hand, move one of your pieces accordingly, then discard the card and draw a new one. Just make sure that the pre-printed movement pattern doesn’t take you off the board and that your pawn’s path doesn’t go through another piece.

If you can line the movement up in such a way that your pawn ends its movement in the same space as an opponent’s piece, you can kick it back to the starting line. That’s where things get mean and that’s where your strategy might come in. Waiting for an opponent to get near the end and then kicking them all the way back to the beginning feels very satisfying, I can tell you.

Get Booted!

Of course, as soon as you finish one game, you probably want to play again and try out a different strategy. Maybe next time you should just rush to the other end and ignore everything else. Maybe the best option is to try and block your opponent in while you open up a path for your own pieces. There are so many different ways to victory and as you change your approach, your opponent will have to do the same.

I really enjoyed playing Booted! with my wife. It’s really quick to learn, set up and play. You sometimes curse your card luck, but given that you always have four cards to choose from, it’s probably more about your bad planning than chance if you lose. After all, the movement patterns have been carefully chosen, based on the geometry of the game board. It’s all very mathematical.

In some ways, Booted! is more about playing bad cards early on in the hope of getting better cards that give you more tactical choices. Cycling through the deck can be useful and even out some of the luck of the draw. However, even if you draw only bad cards, the game is over so quickly that you don’t really mind.

So, if you fancy a quick abstract strategy game for two players that has Onitama vibes, then Booted!, which was created by Skyden and Karissa Tang, two teenagers from Silicon Valley, over the summer of 2022 during the COVID pandemic, is a game you should check out. It’s a solid, light game for all the family.

Useful Links

• Booted!: https://www.bootedthegame.com/
• Rulebook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mt6R6a7kZYOBaXzNCdAup07sOS71ryyq/view?usp=sharing
• Rules video: https://youtu.be/Sg-XlWMvoEM
• BGG listing: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/378065/booted

Videos

Transparency Facts

I feel that this review reflects my own, independent and honest opinion, but the facts below allow you to decide whether you think that I was influenced in any way. Please also read my Ethics Statement for more information.

• I was given a free review copy of this game by the publisher.
• At the time of writing, I have not received financial support from the publisher or anyone working on their behalf.

Audio Version

Intro Music: Bomber (Sting) by Riot (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/)

Music: “light my way” provided by mobygratis.

Playlist

These are the songs I listened to while I was writing this review: