Flick, Flick, Flick: Sonora

Over the past couple of years, the "roll and write" genre of board gaming has increasingly become just the "...and write" genre, as new games have come along with new angles other than dice. Common to all these games is a personal score sheet where you mark your own progress, but what you're doing to win can be very different.

Designer Rob Newton has paired this with a manual dexterity game in Sonora, making essentially a "flick and write" game. A square "arena" is placed between up to four players; it's divided into four quadrants that each correspond to a different section of a personal score sheet given to each player. On your turn, you flick one or two discs from the side rail into the arena, proceeding around the players until all players have flicked discs valued 1 through 5 into play. Then players mark things off on their score sheets according to which numbers have ended up in which areas.

The game lays on the mini-games pretty thick, not unlike another roll and write game I've played, Twice As Clever. On your score sheet, there's a race section, a vaguely Tetris-like section, a vaguely hopscotch section, and a vaguely "dots and boxes" section. Any one mini-game is manageable, but the four collectively are pretty overwhelming.

And that's before you get into the quirks of the flicking arena. There's a depression in the center; get your disc in there and you immediately remove it to place on any scoring quadrant you choose. Then, in each of the four sections of the arena, there are two small areas a disc can land over -- each suddenly switches the scoring to a different section of the game, sometimes for double points.

The game is hard to understand at first, and so chaotic that it feels almost completely random for most of your first play. What does a good shot even look like? What's good, and then, assuming you know what is, do you have the flicking skill to even make that happen?

And I'm sorry to say, there's some difficult art design here that magnifies all those issues. Sonora has a very artistically chosen color scheme, presenting a desert in stark yellows, oranges, and blues. Different sections of the arena use similar colors and not-different-enough patterns; your score sheets don't match up to those colors and patterns clearly enough. There's an animal symbol in each quadrant of the sheet that's supposed to help, but those aren't printed in the arena, save in tiny iconized form in that center depression -- where the four icons are similar looking and similarly colored. Basically, the art not only doesn't help you play the game, it actively makes it harder.

As I've played more Twice As Clever, I've come to feel that it has an odd kind of "balance." There are five different parts of the score sheet, and good strategy is to focus most on two for a winning score. Except that you can't really chose any two if you want to be competitive -- after a dozen playthroughs, it's emerged in my group that one section in particular is really a "must do." Sonora appears to have a similar balance, where you really should try to concentrate your scoring/flicking efforts... yet there's one zone in particular where you must compete to win.

Doesn't sound great, does it? Well... here's the thing. It does grow easier to understand as you play it more. A limited sense of strategy does start to appear. And that core idea, merging the "and write" genre with a flicking game is a very fun idea. Basically, I would play Sonora again if given the opportunity, to see if it grows on me, because I do want to like it. But man, it feels like it's making itself way harder to like than it should be.

I give Sonora a C+. If you're a big fan of dexterity games, or of other roll and write games, you might want to give this one a try. But I suspect for most groups, this will be average at best.