Adorable can sometimes give a game the edge

 I picked up the files for Pocket Puffins because our son has a lifelong love of penguins and aren’t puffins and penguins kind of alike? (Little bit of basic research later: They are very distantly related, live in completely different biomes and puffins can _fly_?!) Okay, penguins and puffins are only very superficially alike. Birds who both like fish.

At any rate, Pocket Puffins is about rearranging a line of puffins wearing nifty anoraks and building igloos for them.

It’s a micro game that breaks down into two decks of cards. Twelve double-sided puffin/goal cards and six action cards. The puffin side of the puffin/goal cards show a red, yellow or blue puffin and the right or left half of an igloo. The goal side shows a row of nine penguins, each in a specific color order.

Pretty sure you can see where this is going.

Randomly draw a puffin of each color to make a goal deck and shuffle the rest into a line. Each action card shows each color and a movement of one to three, different for each color. Each action card lets you move one puffin X number of spaces.

So you have to move puffins around to make them match the goal cards. It’s a mechanic that I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen before.

There are two touches I quite like. One: every time you have to reshuffle the action deck, you discard a card. Run out of cards before you complete all three goals. You lose. Two: every complete igloo you make when you complete a goal is a point. 

When it comes to solitaire games, I like ones that have more than just beat your best score, where there is a win-lose condition. I love Palm Island but Palm Laboratory adding the goals made the experience better. Pocket Puffin has that.

I will admit that I think actually getting the puffins in order isn’t that difficult. Getting igloos built, man, I haven’t figured out how to do that to get a score worth a darn.

With that said, while the mechanics are solid, Pocket Puffins really needs its theme as well. If I was trying to get squiggles, circles and squares in order, I wouldn’t be engaged. Cartoon puffins in anoraks are necessary to reel me in. That touch of adorable makes a big difference.

Pocket Puffins is a quiet, cute little solitaire. It has several touches, both mechanical and thematic, that make it fun and keep me putting it in the table.