At first mention Hurry Up Hedgehog, the first thing I thought it was a Sonic-clone. After spending some time with the game, however, I found out that this is as far as you can get from being a Sonic clone Hurry Up Hedgehog started out as a German board game that was turned into a DS port. These kinds of games are perfect for Nintendo’s handheld system. The board game to DS port feels like a cross between checkers and backgammon.
The premise of the game is simple, yet a little complex. Each player starts with four tokens on the far left of the screen. During every start of a turn, a random row is chosen. When it’s your turn, you move one token vertically and one token horizontally along the chosen row. Be on the lookout, however, as tokens can be shoved into pits where they are trapped until all the other tokens have caught up. The first player to get three of his or her tokens to the far right wins.
It sounds simplistic, but I really had no idea how to play at first. This game really could have used some sort of tutorial to help explain all the rules and different things that happen during the game. But, after playing a few rounds of the game, I had a better understanding on how the game plays and it can get somewhat addictive. The strategy changes per round as you can manipulate the rules for each round before diving in.
For a DS game, the look of it is pretty simplistic. On the top screen, you have the “score card” that shows how many players are in the game and how many tokens they have in their home base. The bottom screen has the actual game board which has the staring rows, the ending rows and everything in between. But I guess since it’s a port of a board game, the look fits the build.
While the game has a decent single player campaign, the multiplayer is where the fun really lies. There are a ton of options to customize the experience as well. For example, you can set it up to where the tokens stack up on one another or set it up to where they push each other. Or do you roll a die before each turn or do you pick which row will move. And these are only a small taste of what you can customize in the game.
Hurry Up Hedgehog is a decent game for the Nintendo DS that suffers from a few problems, but this board game turned portable video game has some innovative ideas that may lead to more quirky board games finding a home on the Nintendo DS. If you have any interest in eccentric board games, or are just looking for something new to toy around with, then Hurry Up Hedgehog might be for you, but be warned there really isn’t much outside of the core mechanic to keep you coming back more and more.
