Games featuring Sheep

Despite the comic and cuddly look of the sheep pieces, this is an intense game of struggling for the best position in the flock.

Each player has a menu of allowed moves such as move a column, or jump over a sheep, and must use these moves to reach their goal.  However two things make this more complicated (and more fun).

First, you can only use each choice on your menu once or twice.

Second, as the game progresses your goals change: early on you want your two sheep to be be next to each other, then you want them to be as close as possible to Roger the Ram (holding a rose and obviously the Brad Pitt of the pen), and at the end of the game you want to be as far away from the shearer as possible!

Playing the game is a bit like solving a puzzle, but you do it with cute sheep and with other players trying to make the puzzle rather tricky!

It's an Aussie classic.  A game with a quintessentially Australian theme, designed and published in Australia.

Each player takes the part of a grazier and tries to inprove their sheep station so it can support more head of sheep. The sheep are represented by plastic sheep heads.  

The game uses dice to move around a ring track a bit like Monopoly, but you need to time your purchasing decisions: more sheep or better pastures?  You can also sell sheep, hopefully when the market is high, to raise money with which to improve your pastures.  

The game is fun for everyone and can teach you a few things about sheep drenching and weed control!

You are a shepherd trying to pen your flock together in as big a pen as possible.  If by accident you pen your opponents' sheep in small pens, or next to some wolves, that just too bad isn't it?  

Each turn you play one of your tiles which shows sheep and perhaps a pen fence or a forest edge, and so the game board gradually expands.  Making the game tricky and more fun is that the tiles have a different picture on each side which gives you twice as many choices.  The colour of the jumpers that your sheep are wearing is also a secret at the beginning of the game, which allows the opportunity for bluff.

This is a fairly simple game with beautiful tiles that the whole family can enjoy.

It is a wolf in sheep's clothing.  The cute pictures on the cards and pieces belie the rather vicious and tactical nature of the game.  

You move your sheep around, which is not as easy as it may sound as they only like to walk in a straight line and won't stop until they bump into something.  Hopefully they will stop on some lush grass which you will be able to chomp and so score some points.

Unfortunately there are also wolves lurking in the grass, and they will chomp up sheep if they move onto them.  The only way to avoid the wolves is to send your sheep on recon missions or to put them in camoflague mode!

Think of chess mixed with crazy sheep antics and you'll have a good idea of what this game holds in store.

Snorta is best thought of as Snap with attitude, and is crazy grunting snorting fun at its best!

Each player has a rubber farm animal that they show once and then hide in their barn. In turn, each player flips over a card picturing an animal on to the pile in front of them. If two players' piles have matching cards, the first to make the noise of the animal in the barn of the other player wins the "duel" and the loser must pick up both piles of cards.

The winner is the first person to get rid of all their cards.

Also available from Ventura as a cheaper game with only cards and no cute barns and animal figures.  This game is a hit with families of all ages, and lets kids compete effectively with adults.

This is a great party game that will have have everyone yelling and complaining!

One player announces a topic such as "waking up", and then every other player draws in secret a sheep card which will be black or white.  Based on their sheep, the player must then select one of the attribute cards they have: if they drew a black sheep they want an attribute clearly not matching the topic selected, while a white sheep means their attribute should be a good match.  

The attributes are revealed simultaneously, and now in a second phase, players must try and grab an attribute from a player they think drew a white sheep.  This is the fun part of the game where the cries of recrimination:"what were you thinking?" break out!

Settlers has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, and as soon as you have played you will know why!

You are colonising an island and building a network of villages, roads and towns. Construction needs raw materials such as lumber, bricks or wool, but your villages will only be able to produce a few of the needed materials. This means that you must trade with other players whose villages can produce the needed materials. Each game starts by building a new island of Catan.

The ability to negotiate good trades and cleverly develop your settlements on the island are needed to emerge the best settler of Catan.

The box says that you are a lighthouse keeper who grazes sheep, but in practice this is just a fine card game: one of the best in the Gamewright range.  

Players are dealt 12 weather cards which have a value ranging from 1-60, and recieve some life preserver tokens. Then each turn, 2 tide cards are turned face-up and the players must bid on these by secretly selecting one of their weather cards. The aim is to avoid taking the high value tide cards as these make you lose life preservers.  

The tension comes from the fact that the hand goes for 12 turns so all your cards have to be played, meaning everyone will have to take some tide cards. Then players pass their hand of weather cards to the left and play again - which means that there can be no complaints about an unlucky hand of cards as everyone has a chance to play everyone else's hand!