This is not a new game. Ganz Schon Clever was the original title when it came out in 2018. This is a very straight forward dice game. The easiest comparison to make (which isn’t fair in any way) is to Yahtzee. In Yahtzee you are rolling 5 dice trying to get certain sequences of numbers. In Clever you are rolling 6 dice and choosing which ones to score.

Quick breakdown. 

Orange Die – Easiest of them all. Put the number in the square. End of game add them up for your orange score.

Purple Die – Little more complex than orange. Put the number in the square for the first square. But then every one after that must be higher than the previous. If you put a 6 in though, it resets and the next can be anything. Like orange, add them up at the end of the game.

Green Die – Maybe my favorite. The first one can be anything, but the second must be a 2 or higher. The third must be 3 or higher. And so on til you hit 5, then the next one resets to 1 or higher. There is a default track that gives you a score based on how far you get.

Yellow Die – Not hard to understand, but tough to do well with. There is a 4×4 grid with each number represented twice (and a few already blocked in spaces.) You can use a yellow die to mark off a number, but be careful because once you mark off the two #1 spaces then a 1 is useless for you! Scoring is based on completing a column.

White Die – This one is wild. So it can be any color at all!

Blue Die – The hardest one to get at first. Because it does nothing! The blue grid has squares ranging from 2 to 12. But how do you get those numbers? You must use the blue and white dice combined in order to mark off a square. Like green, the more you mark off the higher your score.

There are bonus spaces that aren’t worth going into here beyond saying they add strategic thought.

The way the game plays is I will roll all six dice. I then choose one of them to use on my player board. But this decision comes with a cost. Any dice that are lower than the one I choose gets put on the silver plate and is lost to me. I’m going to roll three times on my turn. So losing dice reduces my options for rolls two and three. This means you don’t want to choose a high number on the first pick! After I have chosen all three of my dice, there will be three on the silver plate (unused ones at the end of my third pick also go there.) Other players get to choose one of those three and mark something off on their board.

With 4 players, the game goes for 4 rounds. Pretty quick and easy. But it is a tremendous amount of fun. I compare it to Yahtzee, but it truly is nothing like it. And this game is super cheap. You can find it online for about $15 usually (for the Stronghold Games version.) One thing I would suggest is taking four of the player sheets from the pad and laminating them. It comes with 100 sheets, but eventually they will run out. Laminate the four and you can play forever!

I would give this game a solid 9. Happy to play it anytime. And if I am trying to introduce someone to the idea of gaming, this is a great one to start with. Get them thinking about dice in a different way than just Farkle or Yahtzee. From here it is just a few weeks ago from melting their brain with something like Tapestry from Stonemeir Games.