Year: 2015 | Players: 2 | Minutes: 30+ | Ages: 12+
This …and then, we held hands review was made after playing the game five times.
What is …and then, we held hands?
In …and then, we held hands, you and your fellow player are in a failing relationship. You must cooperate in order to achieve emotional balance within and between yourselves. You must work together to overtake objectives together, and hopefully stay together.
This game was designed by David Chircop and Yannick Massa and published by LudiCreations.
Rules Overview
At the beginning of the game, each player has two tokens. One is on an emotion scale, starting at zero, while the other marks where you are on the board. Players select six cards from the emotion deck, shuffle the objectives deck and make three separate eight-card decks, and begin play.
The catch to …and then, we held hands is twofold. First of all, the players may not discuss the game while playing. That’s right, this is a cooperative game where you must remain entirely silent. Secondly, players can only see and use one half of the emotion cards in front of them and those played by their partner; emotion cards have colors that correspond to movement areas on the board.
Players discard emotion cards in order to move around the outer circle of the board and must land on the color indicated by the objective card in order to complete the objective. In order to move, players may select cards from either set of emotion cards – theirs or their partners. As players move, their emotional balance scale shifts, and they cannot continue to move if the shift would cause the emotional scale to move past +2 or -2.
Once 8 objectives have been completed on the outer circle, players begin moving in toward the center and must come to the center of the board together in order to win the game.
You will lose if you don’t hit that center mark on consecutive turns; if you don’t have a valid move to make at any point in the game; or if you have no emotion cards in front of you and you have gone through all of the card in the deck.
There are extra cards in the box that have grey bars to indicate that they are of greater difficulty. These cards are only recommended once you have a few games under your belt.
Check out …and then, we held hands at Amazon
Pros and Cons
Pros
- The story behind this game and the mechanics make …and then, we held hands very interesting to play. Not only being unable to speak, but only being able to see half of any given card that your partner has gives it a surprising level of difficulty considering this is a seemingly simple game.
- In addition to that, your ability to play from your partner’s emotion deck makes it cooperative in a slightly different sense than how it is usually thought of in gaming. Rather than choosing items or advancements to help each other out, you have to read your partner player, not just in what they have in their cards but as a person in order to understand their planning and their intentions in the game.
- We always give designers credit for trying to do something different, and …and then, we held hands is definitely something different. None of us had ever played a co-op board game like this before, that’s for sure.
Cons
- Since this is a light game, you pretty much have to get into the theme for it to have legs. If you are just trying to solve the puzzle, you’re probably not going to want to play too many times after your first victory.
- You’ll also want to stay away from …and then, we held hands if you’re not a fan of games that have you stay silent. It makes sense thematically in this game, but we get why some people would avoid it for that reason alone.
- The artwork on the cards is just okay, which surprised us considering it was done by the same artist who made the beautiful cards for Dixit.
Final Thoughts
…and then, we held hands isn’t going to be for everyone, but it’s a pretty good game overall. It’s great if you want a two-player game that tests how well you can work with someone as teammates, but you absolutely have to be able to get into the theme for it to last more than three playthroughs.
…and then, we held hands isn’t going to make it onto our top co-op games for two players list, but most of us think it’s an above-average game.
…and then, we held hands Links
BGG | Amazon | CoolStuffInc | eBay
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