Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Sometimes, you need to table a game that is good, dumb fun. (And look—I might sound like a guy who has the mental capacity to play heavy pieces of chicken like Speakeasy, Nucleum and Railways of the Lost Atlas, but the reality is that this works only because I balance it with games like UNO.)
Any time a new Ravensburger game arrives at the house, my kids want to give it a spin. That’s because Ravensburger has generally been good to us—Villainous, Horrified, Piñata Blast, The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game, Dungeons, Dice & Danger, etc.—and the games are always easy to get to the table. So when I whipped out Oh My Pigeons! after dinner the other night, something magical happened:
The kids wanted to play it again as soon as the game was over.
Now, some of that is because Oh My Pigeons! is SO short. The first game was won in less than five minutes. But subsequent games didn’t take much longer, with our longest game taking about 12 minutes. That’s because Oh My Pigeons! is so easy to teach you can knock that part out in less than 60 seconds.
Each player has a hand of three cards, all of which do something to the collective players at the table. Each player has a small bench with three cute gray pigeon meeples, with space for more (this varies based on player count). On a turn, you play a card, and likely get more pigeons, steal from other players, roll a die to take pigeons from either the supply or other players, or trade benches with other players. Once a player has a full bench of pigeons, the game immediately ends with that player declared as the victor.
At the Bell compound, we usually don’t like to play games where people steal from each other—UNLESS that game is Tanuki (2024, Synapses Games), and the entire game is about getting “got.” No one in my circles likes to play a two-hour Euro where someone can get robbed one time as a result of a card effect. It just doesn’t feel right. Do you know those cards in Terraforming Mars that allow a player to steal plant cubes from an opponent? Everyone I play with takes those cards out of their Terraforming Mars decks.
But in Oh My Pigeons! —just like Tanuki —nobody cares if you are getting robbed on nearly every turn. And nobody minds because the games are over so fast.
The game’s cards have funny artwork, and there’s a mechanic where a die roll could lead to a dexterity element in each play—the active player has to try and knock pigeons off of an opponent’s bench by flicking a die in their direction. When flicks are on target, watching birds get knocked off a small cardboard tile is strangely comical.
I did three plays of Oh My Pigeons! —eleven each at two, three, and four players. The game accommodates up to five players, and I think it will live on as a game that we break out with our entire family of four as often as we can. It’s great to play this on a bigger table to make the flicking more dramatic. A smaller table makes it too easy to knock a bunch of birds out of contention!
Oh My Pigeons! It was a welcome surprise. As a family-weight filler, it’s a good time at the table!
Oh My Pigeons! details
- Designer: N/A
- Artists: Alena Istif
- Publishers: Ravensburger
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 8+
- Mechanism(s):
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.65955 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Oh My Pigeons!.
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