Booted – Board Game Review
Last time I got COVID, I was in a place of tiredness and continual farting. The type of long winded farts where you try to play a tune and pray at your age that things don’t suddenly become wet. Especially if you cough. Funnily enough, COVID didn’t make me cough. It made me brain foggy and tired and almost able to pass as a trombone. If you were Karissa and Skyden and you got COVID in 2022, you decided to sit down and create a chess adjacent grid based travel to the opposite side of the board type board game call BOOTED!. I have no idea on the level of flatulence that was involved. Probably best that remains near the open window of the past.
The game is extremely easy to pick up, you control four pawns which you are trying to get to the other side of the board, while preventing your opponents from doing the same. Movement is based around a hand of cards that show direction and the number of spaces, with you starting with a hand of four cards to begin with. As you play your cards, you’ll replace them with new cards to allow you to continue your advancement. If you manage to play a card that has you landing on an opponents space, they are they Booted from the board and sent back to whence they came. Get all four of your pawns to the other side and you win, and then get to brag forever about how you won. (Even birthdays and holidays if the mood takes you.) Booted is unlikely to last you more than 20 minutes to get the game set up, played and then even set up again if you want to play it. It seems to have been designed to be far on the left side of casual fun, and while the first impression might be that this is a variant of chess, the lack of direct piece strategy and simple turns pushes it more to be a family centric game than something you would challenge someone at the local board games club.
It is no surprise that Booted! is found on Amazon. For a smaller company where warehousing and distribution can be a pain, it can sometime be easier to pack a box and ship it off to the fulfilment centre, safe in the knowledge that it is one less thing to take care of. While the game section is a busy space, people are likely to give a game a chance they don’t know where the risk is lowered and Booted sits in the strategy camp relatively well, reminding me most of games like Quoridor and Qawale. Though it is missing out of the thick and juicy cut components that range of games offers. I even wonder if given a reskin it would actually sit quite well in that collection. Booted offers as simple a ruleset but errs slightly on being a touch more fiddly than those potential bedfellows. It’s difficult to fault a game that doesn’t obviously come from a well established publisher where additional polish would push it over the line. A game created out of the ashes of lockdown is a nice and memorable story at the moment. Time however will need the game to stand on its own two feet with the backstory on its creation being that, a backstory that adds flavour and history rather than a reason to buy.
Which is probably why the choice of eCommerce route fits in well with the potential intended audience. Booted is straightforward enough that its likely to grace family table where Kallax units are used for things like books and ornaments rather than box after box living on shelves of opportunity. It sits on the table slightly less aggressively than it maybe should, and without the polish you would expect from a game produced by a bigger company.
Booted! for me is a great effort, it does exactly what the designers intended it to do. I personally think there were more things that could have been done to the game to add those little extra winning touches. That is probably more of a me thing than anything else. When you play so many games with a critical eye you sometimes see what you would like a game to do compared to what it actually does. For Booted, I think it needs more than four pawns on each side. I think some of the spaces should be interactive and move the player piece when landed on. I’d like players to be able to play cards that have effects on the opponents as well as themselves. At that point though I really should shut up and create my own game rather that tell others what they should be doing with theirs.
Booted is a good game, and for those who like a simple set up and take down, a five minutes rule teach and want something that is going to help them spend half an hour of time then it’s probably not a bad shout. It’s a simpler variation on chess, its a take that without the smackdown. You’ve got to applaud Skyden and Karissa for taken a bad situation and creating something off the back of it. It deserves a gentle kick rather than to be booted off the table.
Find out more about Booted by visiting https://www.bootedthegame.com/
This review is based on the retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid monetary compensation for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned. The majority of the games that we are play are going to take a reasonable number of sessions and playthroughs to fully understand every possibility that they offer. We hope this write up gives you an idea of whether or not this game is something that you will consider playing or even add to your collection. Even if we don't like something, hopefully it helps you to decide if it is something that you should find out more about. We always suggest you check out a gameplay video to give you a better understanding of the game as it is played. If you would like to support more content on the blog then please consider backing us on Patreon. www.patreon.com/werenotwizards
