Duck & Cover (Saturday Review)

You just wanted to take a quiet and relaxing bath, but your plastic companions had other ideas. Instead of peacefully bobbing on the water, they turned into mad mallards. Water started to splash everywhere. Argh! You had only one choice. You had to Duck & Cover by Oussama Khelifati from Captain Games with art by Adrien Journel.

Duck or Cover

As you can tell from the intro, Duck & Cover is a madcap game of preventing your rubber ducks from soaking your bathroom. In the game, that’s represented by you stacking cards on top of each other to reduce the amount of ducks visible. How that works is pretty simple.

Everyone starts with a randomly shuffled 4×3 grid of duck cards numbered 1 to 12. You can choose from seven differently themed duck decks, ranging from fantasy to horror, sci-fi to famous rulers. It doesn’t really matter which deck you choose, as they’re functionally all the same, but of course, it is definitely more fun to play with space-themed ducks, if you ask me.

Each duck card has a splash value on it. Your goal is to end up with the fewest cards and the lowest total splash value across your visible cards.

Each turn, a number is called. If the number matches a visible card in your grid, you pick it up and either place it on top of an adjacent card or move it to another open space. If the called card is on top of a deck of cards, you pick up the whole deck instead. So you slowly have bigger and bigger stacks with fewer visible cards.

Now, there is one more twist. If you can merge all of your duck cards into a single stack, the single splash value that’s left will be counted as a negative number. So if you risk keeping the highest splash value visible, you can reduce your score by a fair chunk – and having the fewest points wins you the game.

There are a few more rules, but in principle, you do this three times and whoever has the lowest total score at the end wins.

Quacking Ducks

Duck & Cover is really quick to learn and plays equally fast. It’s not too mentally taxing. You really just have to gauge whether you are going to leave the highest splash value visible, which is a big risk that can either ramp up your score, which you don’t want, or you stand to lose a good chunk of points, which could potentially propel you to first place.

Otherwise, you need to do a bit of card counting, because the number that’s called each turn is based on another deck that has all numbers 1 to 12 in it twice, plus two special action cards. So you know that once you’ve ducked or covered a card twice, it’s not going to be called again. At least not until the deck runs out and is reshuffled for another round.

The rest is down to the luck of the shuffled deck.

There is a good amount of control, though. The more you play Duck & Cover, the better you’ll get at it. When I first played it with two people who knew the game really well, I always lost. So they clearly had a grasp of the tactics to employ. When I played it again with someone else who had never played it, I won, at least to start with.

So, yes, despite the randomness of your 4×3 grid and what numbers are called in what order, you have a good amount of control over the game. Of course, you can be really lucky, or really unlucky, but over the three rounds that you play each game, the luck factor should even out, and it becomes about responding to the situation at hand correctly.

Quick Ducks

Duck & Cover seems to play differently based on the player count. In my 3-player games, we went through the number deck twice, while in my 2-player games, we often finished before getting to the end of the deck. I’m not sure if that’s because of how good we were at the game, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Generally speaking though, I think the game is more fun at a larger player count. It’s just more fun to have more people around the table, especially when people have to shout “quack” if a number is called that they no longer have in their grid. You don’t have to worry about Duck & Cover taking longer with more people, because everyone takes their turn at the same time. It plays just as quickly with 2 people as it does with 7. In fact, you can buy an art pack that extends the player count to 9 and it will still be just as much fun, if not more.

You also don’t have to spend too much brain power to decide what to do on your turn. There is some thinking involved, but not too much.

Adding it all together, the simple rules, the level of tactical thinking required and the player count range, Duck & Cover is a great family game and ideal for board game nights as a starter or finisher. The art adds to the fun. I also love that it’s basically a big deck of cards, making it easy to have with you. It’s just a great package that I will bring with me to family gatherings for sure.

Useful Links

• Duck & Cover: https://captain.games/en/games/duck-and-cover
• Rulebook: https://captain.games/games/duck-and-cover/rules-en.pdf
• Rules video: https://youtu.be/5T3CPDxxf2g?si=B9d-T1E3PpRttHQA
• Captain Games: https://captain.games/en
• BGG listing: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/422019/duck-and-cover

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.
• Captain Games is a studio of Asmodee and I have done paid work for Asmodee.

Audio Version

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

Music by: Bensound
License code: YYRIV0J1GXWOS7IT

Music: bensound.com
License code: BCDCDZKK824VJ1UD

Playlist

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