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.

I reviewed Snake Charmers awhile ago, and I found that experience punchy and delightful. Now, I’m feasting my eyes on Bubble and Shadow, a game that is prettier, slightly more complicated, and ultimately, flatter.

The game has lofty ambition, noting as its inspiration W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, but I’m not sure if any of that translates. I’ve only read Of Human Bondage, and I ~think~ the aforementioned story is a fictionalized account of Paul Gauguin’s life or something, but I couldn’t for the life of me find how this game was related, other than it having really cool paintings on the cards.

Anyway, the objective of the game is to collect the right distribution of three types of wooden token: If you have the most purple tokens (bubbles), you’ll be eliminated from the scoring consideration at the end of the round. Then, if you have the fewest gray (coins) you score a point and are removed from the scoring. Finally, the player with the most yellow (moons) gets three points, and second most gets two points. You play three rounds, and if someone gets to five-plus points before that at the end of a round, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

But how do you acquire these tokens?

At the beginning of each round, a player gets 11 tokens behind their screen and 6 cards. A random player becomes the “Magician” and chooses a “Mortal” to trade with. The magician chooses a card and gives it to the mortal, who then *might* have some choices. The cards have token symbols on the top and token symbols on the bottom. If the mortal has all the tokens on one side of the card, they have to give those to the Magician, and the Magician gives the tokens on the other side. If there’s only a partial match, or they can pay in full on either side of the card, the Mortal chooses which direction the transaction goes.

This goes around until each player has four cards in front of them, which ends the round and triggers scoring. That’s the game.

Mooned if you do, mooned if you don’t

Bubble and Shadow is a victim of its own hubris. From a high level, there’s something exciting and appealing about the design. It’s discovering the scores of everyone at the table through a form of “I cut, you choose,” a mechanism where you offer another player choices, and take the one they don’t.

But, in practice, the intelligent part of the game is lost after the first pass. The game suffers from what I might describe as the perfect play problem. Theoretically, it’s possible to play your own cards in a way that maximizes your score, where you’re carefully choosing which players to pass to and how to strategically leverage misinformation through obfuscated trading. But the problem is that everyone else is trying to do the same thing, or at least thinks that’s what they’re doing. There is no mechanism to interrupt a play that accidentally kingmakes a player for the round, or fairly distributes the cards that players play. There are no mechanisms in place to prevent bad plays, and arguably, there are no real bad plays. Which means there aren’t clever plays, which is the bread and butter of a game like this.

There’s a variant in the box that shortens the playtime and allows for some additional subtlety, as well as additional alternative tokens, but the game ultimately ends up suffering from the “so smart, it’s dumb” issue regardless of how you tweak the rules.

During my plays of this game, players kept saying things like “I wish you could do this instead” or “This would be more interesting if I could pass to them again…” Often, players being frustrated during a play is a sign of a game with potential, but in this, player issues were often so straightforward that the complaints were, I hate to admit, logical.

I mentioned Snake Charmers up top, which accomplishes a similar feeling to this with far less overhead. The art is beautiful, however, and I’m curious what this designer can get up to with future work. But for me, nothing exciting is bubbling up to the surface with this one.