So Clover! Board Game Review

Year Published: 2021

Players: 3-6

Playing Time: 30 Minutes

“It’s not so much a game as an activity.”

Those who have seen this comment in action realize that it’s rarely uttered in good faith. “Not a game” diminishes it, and the phrase is mostly used in the pejorative sense.

Nevermind that all games are activities and human history is replete with magnificent games that didn’t have such silly things as win conditions or standardized rule sets. The powerful modern consumerist forces that demand a game be marketable have taught us that games must have strict, codified rules and win conditions, or else they are some other artform, and possibly a lesser one.

Thankfully, most people see through this cynical veneer, but others seem more reticent.

So Clover! does have a scoring system, make no mistake. But the final states are not binary win/loss scenarios that we’re used to. It is “play” in the childlike sense of the term. It’s the improvised activity on your refrigerator as you rearrange magnets with words on them, daring yourself to make coherent or silly phrases, or trying to one-up your partner’s most recent efforts doing the same.

Gaming needs more of this, in any medium. Video games like The Sims and Minecraft taught us that we could have open sandboxes without defined end states or win conditions and still have a blast. It’s this unbounded play that has produced some of the most amazing stories from these games, and others like them.

So Clover is not as expansive as these games. It’s a much smaller sandbox, filled with words instead of entire worlds. But it still allows for the same spirit of creativity.

Finding the perfect word to infer certain meanings is a rare treat. Few moments are so satisfying in games as when others intuit what we meant, with all the rationale behind it. So Clover exists to create this moment.

It also exists to create another kind of moment. A more frustrating one, but a funnier one. It’s the moment where the other players piece together the perfect logic for a particular word choice that you made…

…except it’s not the logic you used at all. And in fact led them to horribly erroneous conclusions.

This is the flip side of the coin, and it’s equally as wonderful. The guessers are busy being brilliant, just not in the same way as the clue-giver. But the game is more-or-less blameless, both because – as mentioned – there’s no binary win/loss state, and also because it’s clear that multiple logical paths can be found in such situations, regardless of whether or not they lead to the same conclusion.

The final thing So Clover does that’s just a touch inspired is that it asks you to add a fifth card of words to your pile after you’ve formed clues that point to the first four you drew.

This final card is capricious and cruel. But it cleverly subverts the idea that a “perfect” clue exists. There’s always a small twinge of doubt to accompany your play, making the tension more delicious.

So then, when your group finally gets a perfect score (it will happen eventually if you play enough), it feels doubly satisfying. Dizzyingly so, in fact. You did it together, as a team, and not only did you navigate the infinitely variable word puzzle it hands you, but you did it in spite of the uncaring universe working against you in the form of that fifth, unknowable card.

You have conquered the internal dynamics of play as well as the external world that is your enemy.

This is no small thing, to present two equally daunting monsters within such a simple structure. And then to give the players the tools they need to slay both, while also making the near-miss, approximate victories fun to experience.

You’ll want to talk about a perfect game weeks later. You’ll want to mention it online. You’ll happily tell people about your most brilliant clue, or that of a friend who managed to combine two disparate words under one umbrella. Like a hole-in-one or a 300 game in bowling, a particular clue may live in glory among its players for years.

If this is merely an activity and is not a game, so be it. But if I concede that, I would then simply wish that more activities figured out how to be this fun.