Skippity (2010)

About this game

If Susan McKinley Ross' Qwirkle can be described as a simplified Scrabble – with colors and shapes replacing letters – then her 2010 release from MindWare – Skippity – might be dubbed "checkers for the Timothy Leary set". On a blazingly colored 10x10 game board, players randomly lay out one hundred tokens in five colors, then remove the tokens from the four central squares. On a turn, a player takes a single token and jumps orthogonally over an adjacent token to an empty space, capturing the token jumped. Multiple jumps are possible, with the player capturing each token jumped. The game ends when no more jumps are possible. Players then compare their stacks of tokens, with each set of five differently-colored tokens counting as a set. The player with the most sets wins, with the tiebreaker being the number of tokens captured but not in sets.

Does it fit your group?

• Group size. Works with 2 to 4.
• Rules load. At 2.0/5 this is a mid-weight game — expect a proper rules explanation before you start.
• Age. The publisher suggests 5 and up. That rates the rules rather than the artwork, so judge the box yourself for younger players.