Over the past few years, there has been a trend in art and music: mash-ups. Sometimes it's done with songs and sometimes it's done with paintings. What is a mash-up? It combines two or more things to make something new. For example, photographer Brad Troemel mashed up photos of an old diner in Texas with Rene Magritte's "The Fruit Seller." He combines the idea of eating food with this surrealist painting to get an interesting — and very new — picture. In music, deadmau5 mashes up some techno beats with some piano melodies to create something that sounds like classic Ludwig van Beethoven meets modern dance music artist Skrillex. That's what the artists at osmo have done with their new card game called "haggis". They've taken the old Scottish recipe for making a sheep stomach into a delicacy and mashed it up with some of the most popular German board games of all time. The result is a fast-paced card game for two to five players where you're trying to race through Scotland and Germany to win. It takes about 20 minutes and is recommended for kids about 10 and older (though my 11-year-old nephew LOVED it). For more information, go to: osmosgame. com But is it any good? Let's find out. One of the many parts of "haggis" that really makes it stand out from all the other board games out there is this cool little thing called a bacharach spielfigur, or a brain spielfigur in English. If you haven't played a bacharach spielfigur before, they're a little piece of cardboard that comes with a couple of holes in them and you put your counters in the hole with the number on it. In "haggis", it's used as money. You spend five pennies to get one brain riff. This is one of the many reasons why "haggis" is such a fun game. The players are always working toward their goal (a brain riff) by acquiring resources to trade in for resources (pennies). The goal of "haggis" is simple: get all your markers to Germany by traveling around the countryside. You can only travel to places you've already been, though; you can't just go anywhere. Also, if another player has already been there, you cannot go there again unless it's your final destination (your final destination is like scoring a touchdown in football). The "haggis" board is made up of two stacks of cards: one is Germany and the other is Scotland. You start by drawing one Germany card and three Scotland cards. There are three kinds of markers: people, sheep and haggis. Play begins with each player getting a marker of each color and six pennies (agag — not the Scottish delicacy — in Scottish Gaelic). Each player starts on their little campsite with 3 pennies, a person and a sheep. The first thing you do is "deploy" your markers on the board. So you put them on the spaces that match your marker colors (e.g. 8eeb4e9f32 44
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