Designer: Daryl Chow Publisher: Origame

Durian Dash is a game about collecting the “king of fruits”, the incredibly stinky but nutritious and, apparently, delicious durian fruit.

Each player has a secret mission to collect certain types of durian for bonus points and avoid others to dodge penalty points, and gameplay is so simple.

Playing an action card determines what you can do each turn – picking up fruit, placing down fruit or passing fruit to an opponent. The lower your action card number the earlier you take your turn, and as the market isn’t replenished until all players have made their moves it might prove important to get in there first if there’s a durian at the head of the market that takes your fancy – you don’t want to get stuck with the rotten ones! Or maybe you do if you have a handy passing action up your sleeve to give the manky fruits to your opponents. Once each player has taken their actions the market is restocked and play continues until there’s no more cards to replenish the stalls. Tot up your fruits, including any bonuses and negative points and the highest score wins. There’s also a durian hater mode with identical gameplay but you’re aiming for the lowest score.

The art work in this game isn’t particularly eyecatching once you get past the huge abundance of yellow on offer. There’s not a vast array of difference from one durian to the next, aside from the number of stones in each fruit. Each durian type has a different coloured border and identification text but it can get lost in the sea of yellow cards. It wasn’t too much of a problem in a two-player game but with six players there’ll be an awful lot of durians in play and I think it’d be a little bit harder to pick out the ones you want. But then, simplistic artwork for a simple game works brilliantly in things like Point Salad, so it’s not all bad.

One thing that I would mention is that the game box states that the game is for 3-6 players but this is misleading and initially put me off even looking in the box as it’s only about once a week we’ll play as a three(or more)some, but the game is actually for 2-6 players and the the instructions focusing on a two player set-up in many of the examples.

Other than that, it’s another quick, fun and easy to learn game – something which the selection of titles from Origame provides in abundance.