History Heroes: A Little Slice of History is an easy-playing educational twist on dominoes
History. You either love it or hate it. Well, that or you like very specific, niche bits of it. The main reason for that is because its so vast, but its also not relatable — people don’t draw the same connections between it as they do with other subjects. History Heroes: A Little Slice of History takes historical figureheads and drills them down into fun facts and disciplines, to make it easy to learn.
Dominoes is notorious for its structural simplicity: Players take turns creating adjacent pairs by linking tiles to one another, snaking across the playing surface until somebody wins by using their last tile. If you’ve already got an understanding of that then you’re most of the way through learning History Heroes: A Little Slice of History‘s rules.
The box includes 50 triangular History Heroes cards which will be mixed with 10 event cards. I liked that the cards were triangular as it didn’t just add more opportunities for the cards connecting up but it also meant that the cards created a web rather than a series of long, table consuming snakes as people played.
To play, the cards are shuffled and a handful are taken by each player (up to six, for balance). A central hero card is placed out and then players take turns placing out characters, or event cards, based on matching up the disciplines (a categorisation of what the heroes are famous for; science, acting, writing, politics, etc) on the sides of them. Play continues in this way, assuming there isn’t too major an upset from an event card, until a player runs out of cards in which case they win. If you can’t play then you draw a new card — and if you only have one card left then you need to declare it (akin to Uno).
The event cards are really fun, and there are some real game changers in there. There’s one in that ‘completes a line’ and has the next player collect all of the cards in the line. If, for whatever reason, players haven’t managed to sprawl out over the table but have instead created a big long line then this is really game changing.
The final rule is that you can justify links between characters that have question-mark symbols as one of their disciplines. These heroes tend to have been active in a mass of different areas, for instance David Bowie who was an activist, musician, artist and actor during his time. This justification part is both the most ingenious and tricky part as younger players who are learning about these historical figures (of which, for some, the fun fact has little educational relevance) for the first time will not know the connections.
History Heroes: A Little Slice of History was a whole lot of fun, especially the event cards. It’s also incredibly compact, and you can easily customise the playtime of by changing the starting hand, both of these things make it perfect for when you’re away from home or want to spend some time with the family.
History Heroes: A Little Slice of History is available on Amazon.
