16 lueurs d’hiver, winter expands on fall

Let’s start off with thanking Accessijeux for letting a game published for their charity out into the wild and Benjamin Cronshaw for translating the rules into English.

16 lueurs d’hiver or 16 Winter Lights is a multi-player solitaire Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write that was originally published to raise money for Accessijeux. It’s the second in a series of season themes games, in this case, winter.

While 61 Autumn Leaves uses a format of one die to pick a mini game and one die to use in the chosen mini game with the third die going to the turn track, 16 Winter Lights mixes it up. 

There are five mini games. Each turn, you get to pick one of the mini games and assign two of the dice to it. And, instead of a turn track, you check off a light from numbers one through five, which six being wild.

Each of the turn marker numbers have four lights. If you fill in all four, you get some kind of special power. After someone completely fills in four of the five, the game ends. So the game will last sixteen to nineteen turns.

Make no mistake, 16 Lights is on the simple side of the Roll and Write spectrum.That said, it does have a bump in complexity from 61 Leaves and it offers a lot of good choices. And I really like how you unlock different special powers. I feel like there isn’t one single obvious choice or path to victory. 

The mini games in 16 Lights of include more than just make sets of numbers. The restriction of needing to use two dice makes the choices more nuanced. I could even see the domino mini game being expanded into a stand alone game. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still really like 61 Leaves. I just think  there’s less game in it compared to 16 Lights. 61 Leaves is _very_  accessible but I find 16 Lights more engaging.

16 Lights is not just 61 Leaves with different pictures. It is a meaningfully different game that also happens to be a pretty good game.