30th Apr 2026 - Shear
by Robin. Fri 1 May (Updated at Fri 1 May)Terraforming Sheep, Terraforming Baas, Reticulating Splines... strangely none of these descriptions quite does justice to the latest addition to the NPBGC home-grown games collection: Shear. This was our chance to preview what the playtesters at UKGE will be seeing in a few weeks' time - a game all about wool. And sheep.
We first got wind that a sheep game was in the offing when we playtested its thematic rival, Fleece & Fortune, which Martin & Amanda brought over from Portugal last year. I learnt all there is to know about the process of turning sheep into clothes from that. There are apparently loads of stages to go through - possibly more than my thematic attention span was really prepared for. Not so in Shear: in this one you just trim off the wool and it becomes clothes. Easy.
Many of us also enjoyed Dan B's last offering, Barton In Bloom - also known as the flowers game, and indeed as Terraforming Yards. That was a proper mid-weight Euro game. Shear, by comparison, was much lighter, and shorter. As I've learnt from my own game-design efforts, keeping it simple is a real challenge - and easier to sell to publishers. So Barton In Bloom may be more my kind of game, but Shear, which plays smoothly and would probably rate about 2.5 on BGG's complexity rating, is a great achievement.
It's basically a card game with 3 sorts of cards: sheep cards, action cards and contracts. You have a hand of action cards, and (usually) play one each turn to do one of the main actions: buy, sell, shear or dye. You buy sheep, which are placed face-up in front of you - in what we eventually agreed should called your Flock (as opposed to your Herd, or Pack, or Gaggle). They then grow wool, which you need to fulfil contracts to make specific clothes. There are definite parallels with Barton In Bloom - but instead of different types of flowers, you have different colours of wool.
And the colours is where it gets really fun. Baa baa black sheep... but in this game, as well as white and black, you also get sheep in all the colours of the rainbow, and even a kaleidoscope/chameleon sheep that produces any colour you like. John Lennon would never get away with it. But if your sheep are the wrong colour, don't worry: you can paint them a different colour with the Dye action, using an unexpected CMY colour model: add red, yellow or blue to white wool to get one of the primary colours, or to a primary-coloured wool to get a secondary colour. So if I need a purple wool to fulfil a contract, and I have a white sheep, I first paint its wool red, then blue, and I then have purple wool. Or if I have a purple sheep and I need red wool, I can first sponge it down to make it white, then paint it red. It's perfectly logical.
The contracts are similarly fun... you need black, white and a colour to make a suit; you need 3 colours to make a dress; or 9 units of any colour to make a suit of armour. And then there's the socks, which are a sort of set-collection challenge based on the thematically confusing premise that each individual sock contract produces a pair of odd socks. Play the game to get the full lowdown, but the general idea is: it's a fairly light game with lots of very enjoyable thematic bits.
It's still got a bit of the Euro feel, with end-game scoring cards, which come from the same deck as the action cards but clog up your hand until the game ends. Which gives a nice strategic question about when to start loading up with end-game scoring. I went a bit early, so I only had 2 action cards left in the final round. Marko and Chris went too late, which turned out to be worse. Andy and Dan got it about right, as far as I could tell, so the win was always likely to be between them.
The final scores were close, with different strategies - if you could call them that. Dan went for lots and lots of contracts, and lots of money; I went for a Jackson Pollock job on my sheep, with points for all the different colours of wool I could produce. And Andy went for socks. Dan was sooo close to finally winning one of his own games, but he was thwarted by the socks, as Andy pipped him by 2 points. It was a lot of fun.
There are a few rough edges to smooth off, a couple of minor balancing issues where certain cards seemed too powerful, but by and large this one seems ready to go. I hope they like it at UKGE. If you're a publisher looking for the next Wingspan (or whatever was the next big "discovery" after that) - you should come along and see all the great stuff being playtested at NPBGC, before everyone else discovers it! Or if you're a member and haven't tried the playtesting yet, you're missing out!