Ice Cool vs My First Stone Age

The game can lead to some awesome moments because of the little penguins. Depending on where you hit the penguin, it will move differently. For example, if you flick the head of it, it will make the penguin jump. This can lead to some crazy trick-shots where someone manages to jump over walls. You can also flick them on the side, which will make the penguin spin. By doing this you could spin through multiple rooms and gather a lot of points or catch several penguins on the same turn.

The gameboard of Ice Cool is big, but it’s quite simple to set up. The playing surface consists of five boxes that all fit in the game’s box. You connect them in the correct places, all of which are marked with colored dots on the edges of the boxes. After that you take the little beige colored fish tokens and place them in the marked spots to keep the gameboard in place, and you’re good to go.

Ice Cool is very straightforward, it all revolves around flicking little penguin pawns. Doorways will have fish pegs attached to them, when you flick a penguin through it, then you’ll receive the fish and get to draw a fish card that gives you victory points. Each round one player will be the hall monitor who will try to catch other penguins and gather their student ID’s by hitting them instead of gathering fish.

The round ends either when the hall monitor has gathered all ID’s or when someone has gathered all three fish tokens. The game ends when everyone has been the hall monitor. The player with the most points on their fish cards wins.

Aesthetically Ice Cool looks very impressive. The playing surface is a 3D school consisting of five different rooms that feature many little details all over the walls – maps, fish, basketball hoops, etc. Everything has a blue, cold-looking color scheme, which kind of mimics an igloo.

The cards also have some great artwork on them. The ID’s are two-sided for boys and girls. Each colored penguin has a different look and style. The fish cards depict, you guessed it, fish. The bigger the point value, the bigger the meal.

The components of Ice Cool are very interesting and well-made. The game’s playing surface is made of five 3D boxes that all fit in the game’s box. The player tokens are four penguins made of hard plastic that are weighted in the base so that they keep wobbling when hit. Throughout the game players gather fish tokens, which are nice and small wooden pieces similar to pegs. There are also some cards in the game – ID cards and fish cards, which are all made of durable cardstock.

The complexity level of the game is great for younger children – it teaches them a lot more than just flipping tiles and moving, it also handles memory, resource management, and some risk.

The forest tiles are upside down, and two of them get flipped every time someone reaches the hut space, so you must keep track of where the tile you want is.

There’s quite a bit of trading and exchanging. When you land on the construction space, you trade in specific resources for a hut. The price of the hut is shown on the bottom of the hut tiles, it can either be three different resources or two resources of the same type. Also, when you reach the trading post tile, you can trade one resource for another.

The game also has a dog “wildcard”, which can substitute any resource, but there’s a catch – there are only two dogs in the game, and if they’re all taken when someone walks on the dog tile, then they can steal it from one of the players, so it’s a risk to hang on to it too long.

Kids and parents probably won’t get bored of the game so quickly because a full game takes only 15 to 20 minutes.

Similarly to the actual Stone Age, the artwork and the components look great, albeit with a cartoony twist, which befits a children’s game. The gameboard and hut tiles have cute prehistoric artwork that include little cavemen doing all kinds of silly stuff – swimming down waterfalls, playing, eating, etc. The 3D villages look very cool, and there’s no mistaking what the resource tokens are supposed to be.

My First Stone Age has high-quality components, so they should hold up very well. The meeples and the resource pieces are wooden, the cardboard huts and movement tokens are thick and rugged, the storage box is sturdy, and the cards are made of durable cardstock.

My First Stone Age is easy to play, as a children’s game should be. Players take turns flipping tokens that tell them where to move. The tokens feature either icons with specific spots or dice, in which case you must move the according amount of spaces. When you reach the hut space, then you can use combinations of resources you’ve gathered to build a hut. The first player to build three of them wins the game.