YUKON SALON

MATTHEW VERNALL Designer: David Fooden | Publisher: Atlas Games

I’ve a soft spot for wonderfully silly party games, even more so when they make me laugh out loud whilst reading its rules.

Yukon Salon tests players to be the greatest stylists in the Great Frozen North. Naturally, your clientele out here is restricted to Lumberjacks and Bears, but thanks to a transferable skill set, you’re capable of cutting beards and styling hair for any customer.

Each turn players have two actions, where they can draw style cards, seat a customer or try to give them a new look. Each style card scores differently depending on customer, as well as offering different rewards for completion, ranging from bonus points to special skills. Higher combined customer and style value score more, but their risqué design means you need to roll equal to or higher than that score on two dice.

If you roll lower than the target, you can discard other style cards to make up the difference, or, if you’re feeling particularly verbose, you can sell your customer on this style, providing an excuse for each missing point instead (like “no no, Beehive beards are perfect for winter as bees are naturally warm when huddled up.”) This gives you a chance to reroll, but only once and can make things worse if you roll less!

The art design gorgeously delivers on theme with the variety of wacky hairdos and overly serious images of lumberjacks and bears adding to the game’s farcical nature.

The game’s lightheaded tone, superb art design combining archive sketches with gorgeously silly hair styles and easy to follow rules make it a great opener game. It may rely on novelty and certainly won’t be something you could play nonstop all evening, but with a design this ludicrously silly, it’s worth grinning and bear-ing (I have no regrets.)

❚ PLAY IT? YES