So Clover! is a cooperative word game.
Title: So Clover!
Year Published: 2021
Designer: François Romain
Publisher: Repos Production
Players: 3-6
Game Time: ~30 mins
Set-up Time: ~1 minute
Ages: 10+
Theme: None
Mechanisms: Cooperative
How to win: Just score as many points as possible
Game Description
A cooperative word association game. Play as a team to get the highest score. Get Keywords and secretly write their common features on your Clover board; these are your Clues. Then work together to try to figure out each player’s Keywords. At the end of the game, add up your score according to how many Keywords you found and write it in the Record of Legends. Try to beat your high score each game!
How to play So Clover!
Learn how to play So Clover!
Theme
No theme, but the Clover/Clever wordplay and the physical clover makes me smile.
Setup & Rulebook
Setup is just distributing a board and pen and shuffling cards.
The rulebook does a good job of explaining the game well including all of the annoying nuances around which words are allowed.
Components
The square cards with holes slotting onto a clover-shaped board look really good and actually works really well. Tip it too far and they fall off of course but you can tip it far enough to write in private quite comfortably.
Ease of Teaching
Very simple, you can easily run a quick demo hand before starting a game.
The nuances of what types of words you can use I mentioned earlier is annoying. I’ve found that if you have to ask if it’s OK you’re probably cheating. 😀
So Clover! Summary
This is a very fun word game similar to Just One which I also really like, I demoed this at UK Games Expo 2021 and loved it so I bought it!
It’s one of those games people seem to prefer to play as a casual activity rather than scoring points, but I like to keep score.
The issue comes when people either can’t (or don’t try to) link the actual words and just pick one word that hits one of them. The hope here is that it’s enough to get that one card in place.
So if the cards are too tough, people can give up and play outside the spirit of the game. This is where the game fails compared to Just One which is a more robust system.
So Clover Round-Up
It’s a fun game to add to the party game rotation for game night.
Rating
I give it 6/10