Scribbly Gum goes beyond dot-to-dot

I learned that Scribbly Gum existed thanks to Koala Rescue Club. When Postmark Games  said that Koala Rescue Club was their second collaboration with Joey Games, who I’d never heard of, I had to find out what the first one was.

Joey Games is an Australian company with a focus on education and conservation. The second version of Scribbly Gum is a Print and Play, Roll and Write adaptation of the original game. Which was a Flip and Write so the adaptation wasn’t much of a stretch. 

Now, Scribbly Gum is clearly designed for a younger audience than Postmark Games’ other products. In fact, one of its intended uses is in the classroom. And, upon first glance, it looked like drawing dot-to-dot on a grid, which didn’t promise much in the way of choices.

Fortunately, while still young family friendly, there turned out to be more to Scribbly Gum than drawing a dot-to-dot line. That does describe the core mechanic: roll two dice and pick one for your move. One to four are cardinal directions, five lets you use scribbly short cuts and six does nothing. But doubles let you pick any of the cardinal directions.

But, there are several nice touches that make the game much more interesting.

A huge one is that you can play extend a line from any point you’re connected to. That means you have heaps more choices than you would if you always had to use your last point. More than that, some ‘points’ on the grid don’t have points. You are creating a network, not a line. 

You’re also collecting resources with each points. You get points (the scoring kind) for each set of resources. There are also goals (each map has six and you pick three at the start of the game) that involve either resources or board positions.

There’s a lot I’ve left out but it’s the kind of game that you can figure out most of it just looking at the sheet. It may be lighter than Voyages or Waypoints or Aquamarine but there’s some good stuff going on in it. 

More than that, Postmark Games added two more boards to the one that the first edition had. And I think more are coming. There’s a lot to Scribble Gum to keep you going. 

Scribbly Gum is the lightest and ‘weakest’ game I’ve tried from Postmark Games (and I don’t expect Koala Rescue Club will change that) but it’s still great. It’s a game that will work for non-gamers but still entertain active gamers.