by Merfyn Lewis
Donnerwetter is a game about weathermen, for two to four players. The production standards are excellent as we have come to expect from these German games, with good quality cards, tiles and wooden markers. The object of the game is to predict the correct weather, much like the Met Office, though hopefully with more success. Predicting the weather correctly moves a frog up a ladder and the player with the highest frog at game end is the winner. Well, it's novel. The game revolves around 36 weather cards which have different weather symbols; 1,2 or 3 white or black clouds. The board is a 4x4 grid with pictures of different houses along the vertical and horizontal planes, the higher the house, the better the initial weather. The game starts with weather tiles being randomly placed face down onto the grid. The tiles stay that way for much of the game, which means Donnerwetter is a memory game. The general idea is to place your prediction marker and trying to change the weather tiles to match. The rest of the game is spent moving and laying tiles with limited intelligence, trying to get your predictions to come right. That's it really, not a game I would play over and over but Donnerwetter is a nice, fun, bluffing and betting game. It has quite clever mechanics and is a game that can be played in about thirty minutes. I have played it quite a few times and it can be rather taxing on the old brain, so if you like memory games then I would recommend this one.
Merfyn Lewis