My odyssey through Postmark’s catalog of single-sheet print-and-play games continues. This week’s titles are none other than Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club, both designed and illustrated by Phil and Meredith Walker-Harding.

You can tell we’ve reached the really good games when I’m covering them two at a time. Although this makes for a good twist, because one of them is pretty dang solid. For babies. I mean that in a good way.

Scribbles!

Scribbly Gum

For those of us who slept through botany class — huh? this school offers botany? — Scribbly Gum refers to the Eucalyptus haemastoma tree, whose colloquial name is derived from the lovely “scribbles” left behind by the chewing of the Ogmograptis moth in its larval stage. In this one, you’re chewing this way and that through the tree’s soft bark to secure meals that will permit you to grow from non-lepidopterophobia-triggering larvae into the Ogmograptis‘s hideous adult form.

The concept couldn’t be simpler. You roll two dice, then choose one of the results to permit movement. The rubric is straightforward. A roll of one lets you move up, two moves you down. Three and four correspond to left and right. Five, meanwhile, lets you follow a rare dotted line, usually forging a shortcut. Sixes are dead rolls, but don’t worry about rolling two of the things, because any double is a wild move that lets you go anywhere.

Turns, then, consist of rolling dice, choosing a direction to move, and securing the nut, blossom, leaf, or water in the space you just reached. Little by little, you spread across the page, leaving behind cutesy scribbles.

There’s a little more to it than that, but not by much. Certain spaces on the food track permit extra moves, and there are optional scoring bonuses for meeting little thresholds. These vary by map, but they usually conform to “eat a certain number of blossoms” or “chew up every space on the left side of the sheet.” It’s simple stuff. Baby’s first roll-and-write.

Even more scribbles!

That might sound like faint praise, but when I used Scribbly Gum in its intended fashion by plopping it in front of my twelve-year-old, she was so charmed that we played all four maps in a single sitting.

Now, she isn’t quite a baby, and this isn’t her first time around the block. She’s played a few games of this ilk before. Paper Dungeons is a favorite, and her official review of Flip Pick Towers was “It’s like Paper Dungeons but not as good.” Reasonable marks coming from her.

But Scribbly Gum caught on because its rules are so darn simple that they get out of the way almost immediately. Which in my daughter’s case, meant she could get down to the serious business of triggering free actions with alarming frequency. Oh, and making her scribbles nice and cute.

This is a minor offering from Postmark, especially compared to its opening trio by Rory Muldoon and Matthew Dunstan. But it’s a pleasant minor offering, a gentle experience that doesn’t burn brains or exclude the little ones. While I’d rather tackle the seas, whether above or below, or a scenic hike, it wasn’t as though I begrudged my time in the presence of these squirmy art-bugs.

Those koalas, on the other hand…

Saving some horrible koalas.

Koala Rescue Club

Koalas are horrible creatures, their natural cuteness belying some truly awful biological processes that I shan’t elaborate here. Koala Rescue Club dresses you into the high-visibility vest of a volunteer planting eucalyptus trees and rehoming the filthy perverts, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the game weren’t so dull.

This is, once again, a game that opens each turn with a rolled die, although here that roll signifies which shape you can place on your sheet. It’s polyomino placement, in a sense, with the caveat that you’re really placing each shape twice. Once for the trees, another time for the koalas who will dozily munch their leaves. This results in tidy rows of circles: a big one for the tree itself, a smaller one within the tree for the koala.

As with Scribbly Gum, there are bonuses to be chased. Filling a column or row with koalas awards a perk. Extra trees and koalas are the norm, useful for filling in spaces earlier left blank. Volunteers allow you to adjust the value of the roll. Skybridges travel across the road to neighboring eucalyptus groves. And koala hospitals earn points. Or in the later maps, trigger bonuses of their own. Optional merit badges offer a few extra points for, say, planting all the trees in Grove C or building all the skybridges.

Like all of Postmark’s productions, it does look nice.

Koala Rescue Club is suitably cute, but the problem is that it isn’t very interesting. In the opening turns, before you have volunteers for adjusting rolls or extra groves for placing any larger shapes that won’t fit among your starting trees, you’re more or less beholden to the roll of a single die. This makes the early stages listless, like one of those games where everybody takes a matching move in the opening turn or two.

Affairs improve as more options are unlocked, but not so much that it often feels like you’re being confronted with hard tradeoffs. The shapes are so simple that matching them into a space is generally a trivial task. The merit badges are unexciting and nearly always repeat themselves. Even the possibility that this might be used as an educational game is somewhat let down by the two-layered shape placement. Where Scribbly Gum could pass for baby’s first roll-and-write, I harbor doubts about Koala Rescue Club.

The upside, I suppose, is that in solitaire it’s a nice enough way to kill a few minutes. Unlike most of the Postmark catalog, where the solitaire mode comes across as an afterthought, here it seems like the right way to play. Maybe that’s because my twelve-year-old declared it boring after one play and insisted we tackle Scribbly Gum again. Still, my few solitaire sessions were markedly more enjoyable than watching her put her head down on ink-marked plexiglass.

In other words, Koala Rescue Club needed rescuing. But who rescues the koala rescuers? I dunno. I just needed an outro.

Access to the files to print Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club was provided by the publisher.

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