Doppelt So Clever (Twice as Clever) Review

Gameplay

Playing Doppelt So Clever will feel very familiar to those that have played Ganz Schön Clever. The dice do different things and you fill in some boxes differently, but the nuts and bolts are basically the same.

For those that haven’t played the prequel, this is a roll and write game for 1-4 players. Players are issued a matching printed sheet of paper and a pen and that’s the setup finished! The aim of the game is to have the most points, easy so far!

Whoever is the first player rolls six coloured dice and chooses one to use on their board, either crossing through the relevant number or adding the number of the dice to their sheet. The white die can be added to the blue to fulfil the placement criteria, or can be used as any other colour as a wild die. As mentioned, there are placement requirements to meet, for example the blue and white must equal or be lower than the number recorded previously. The instructions do a good job of explaining these, so I won’t bore you with the details here.

When choosing a die however, any dice that are lower in number are placed to one side and cannot be rolled again. The active player then rolls the remaining dice again choosing another. They then roll one final time, again selecting a die. All non-active players then get to choose one of the three discarded dice to use themselves. Play then moves around and these steps are repeated.

When all players have had a turn of being an active player the round ends.

Throughout the game players will activate bonuses. These include being able to reuse a dice at the end of the round, bring a discarded dice back down, re-rolling your dice, or filling in another square on your sheet of a specific colour. Fox heads are another bonus which allow you to add your lowest scoring zone onto your final score, a few of these can make a big difference. At the start of each of the first four rounds you will also get an additional bonus. Depending on player count you will play four, five or six rounds before reaching for the calculator and tallying your scores.

Solo variant

Doppelt So Clever has an additional solo mode, this is very much beat your previous score, but still very entertaining. The only difference being that as a non-active player you roll the dice and can choose from the three lowest value dice. I don’t do a lot of solo gaming and I wouldn’t choose this above Ganz Schon Clever. It can be a bit tricky to remember to mark off your rounds as a single player, because you don’t have the same punctuation mark that you do with more players.