Game on: Fleeced

It doesn’t matter who you like most – Wallace, Gromit, or Sean the Sheep. Or even whether you like Wensleydale or not.

If the Gruffalo game allows you to enact a story book, Fleeced is a board game where you play out the action of the third Wallace and Gromit animation: A Close Shave.

This time, the game takes one aspect of the story – sheep rustling – and turns that into a means to compete against other players.

Plus, there’s whistles.  And you are encouraged to use them.

The animation – and the characters

Wallace, the bumbling inventor, and Gromit, his faithful (and much more able) dog, are the stars of a series of animated films by British animators, Aardman.  Wallace loves cheese, particularly Wensleydale.

A Close Shave introduces a few additional characters: Sean the Sheep, Wendoline (owner of a wool shop) and Preston, her (robotic) dog. The board game also borrows a popular character from the second animation: the evil Penguin, able to disguise itself as a chicken by the simple addition of a rubber glove on its head.

This gives you six characters for use in the game.  The game pieces are little models of each character, with a nice weight and feel in the hand.

Junior Player knows the characters well – including the spin-off animated series for Sean the Sheep – so this works fine for us as a family. It probably does help to have seen A Close Shave first, but you could use the game as a reason to watch it, if you haven’t already.

The additional character: the setting

Part of the delight of the animations, for me, is the north of England setting. This is worked out to good effect in the visuals on the board.

The board resembles a map of where Wallace and Gromit live, with roads leading into the centre, at the village green. There are lots of puns too, in shop signs, adverts on the sides of buildings etc, in keeping with the many written puns in the Wallace and Gromit animations.

This will appeal more to the grownups, but as junior players’ reading skills increase, they are likely to enjoy these too.

Notion of the game

The players start at the edge of the board, in their respective locations: their homes, Preston’s factory, and so on. You have 2 dice to throw, meaning that you can move quite long distances around the board.

Everyone makes their way to the village green, and to one of the buildings around the green (shop, town hall, and so on). If you have a ‘key card’, you can open one of the buildings, and steal sheep.

Blow your whistle – steal some sheep!

Picking a sheep rustling card gives you a certain number of sheep – you pick little model sheep out of a bag. You line them up behind your playing piece, and lead them back to your starting point.

Other players are trying to do the same – and potentially to steal away some of your sheep, while you’re en route. The game ends when all the sheep have been led back to the edges of the board.

The biggest attraction, for Junior Player, is that everyone is given a whistle (like a shepherd’s whistle). Every time you start to move your sheep, you have to blow your whistle.

Each sheep piece has a number on the bottom.  By counting up the numbers at the end, you see how many you’ve scored – the person with the highest score wins.

Additional cards

Everyone gets some additional cards at the start of the game. These cards are a bit like chance cards in Monopoly – they can work for you or against you.

Some cards allow you to jump to a square with a piece of cheese on it (allowing you to pick up another card), others to particular buildings around the village green.

Some cards also allow you to multiply your dice score, so that you move around the board more quickly.

Notes on playing

When your junior player gets a bit more confident on counting above 10, and reading a bit, the game really works – because they can work their way round the board, and read the instructions on their cards.

For a less than eager counter, working out their final score proved to be a fun way of counting.

The quality of the board, and pieces, make this an enjoyable game to play – and the whistles really add to the fun. Junior players will particularly enjoy landing close to another player’s line of sheep, and leading some of them off to their own home square.

Even though sheep rustling is a villain’s activity in the animation, playing a game means that there needs to be a basis to win.  This can be a place to explore good and bad roles, in a low-key way.

We found our set second-hand, for the bargain price of £2, but as it seems to have been out for a few years, you may also find it at a good price elsewhere.

Best played with cheese and crackers to hand, no doubt – particularly Wensleydale.