Eskimo Fishes

The annual Ice Fishing Festival… a day when all the Eskimo children in your village get a chance to show off their skills and see who can catch the most fish. You are finally old enough to participate and anxious to prove yourself to the other children. You will need to carefully scout the area for the biggest fish, cleverly maneuver across the crowded ice, and strategically manage your limited supply of lures if you hope to out-fish the competition. Do you have what it takes?

Eskimo Fishes is a competitive tile placement game in which players use an assortment of colored lure tiles to influence (and hopefully catch!) fish scattered throughout a modular lake map.

At the start of the game, ice tiles are shuffled and laid face-up in a grid to form the frozen lake and colored fish tokens representing holes in the ice are placed on each of the tiles. Players’ turns consist of two phases: movement and fishing. During the movement phase, players must move their Eskimeeple to a new unoccupied ice tile. During the fishing phase, players manipulate a rondel on their player board to select a lure tile that must then be placed adjacent to their Eskimeeple. After a set number of rounds, each fish is caught by the player with the highest sum of like-colored lure tiles placed around it. The player who catches the highest total value of fish is the winner!

Eskimo Fishes was a finalist for the 2017 Ion Award (presented by SaltCon) in the light game category!