Inside the Mayfair Offices:

“We’ve got ourself a new game to get out there.”

“What’s it about? Please tell me it’s about trading goods. I love trading goods.”

“It’s about penguins.”

“Trading penguins?”

“Penguins eating fish.”

“Which they then trade?”

“There’s no trading. We just need a title.”

“How about ‘Penguin’?”

“No, that’s too simple, it would make too much sense, everybody would see it coming a mile away.”

“How about ‘Penguins’ as in the plural of Penguin?”

“Better, but I’m not feeling it. We need something punchier. Something with exclamation marks. Something like ‘You! Over There! Give Me Back My Fish!’”

“It’s a bit long, how about ‘Woah! You Took My Fish Away!’”

“No. I’ve got it. ‘Hey! That’s My Fish!’”

“That’s perfect, because we all know that if penguins did have the ability to talk they would definitely yell at each other.”

“Thumbs up.”

“Did you just say ‘thumbs up’ out loud?”



Daffy titles aside what’s actually going on in H!TMF!?

The game consists of a set of 60 top quality hexes that make up the playing area. Each hex has either 1 fish, 2 fish or 3 fish on it. Shuffle those bad boys around and set them up in a grid made up of a row of eight, a row of seven, a row of eight, a row of seven and so on and so forth until you run out of hexes.



You are given a number of little wooden penguins which are also what we in the biz call ‘top notch’ (4 penguins in a 2 player game, 3 in a 3 player, 2 in a 4 player.) You place your penguins on a starting space, which can be any hex with only one fish on it.



On your turn move your penguin as far as you want in a straight line in any direction. You can’t move past another penguin and you can’t change direction during the move. Pick up the tile you were just on and THAT’S IT. The person who picks up the most fish wins.

I know this is a complaint that’s been levelled at Hey! before but quite seriously it takes as long to set up as it does to play. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing, but when the setting up also happens to be about as fun as the actual playing of the game, that’s when we hit troubled waters.



Yes, after the initial randomization of the tiles the game is “pure strategy” but no, that doesn’t translate to hours of fun. Minutes of fun, sure, but not hours.

Each game of Hey! That’s My … (damn that titles annoying to type a lot) … that I've played has lasted about five minutes. If you’re well aware of that fact going into the game then I think you’ll be okay with it. Don’t mistake my ‘five minutes’ as an exaggeration of a game that in real life takes about 15 or 20… no, it takes about five minutes to play and I’d rather spend my money on a longer game.



There’s nothing wrong with the game itself. The game works just fine, I’m not disputing that, I’m simply saying that it’s brief. If brief is your thing well then buy two tickets on the brief train cause you just bought yourself a house of brief… whatever that means. For me it was too brief, and that came as a bit of a surprise.

After reading a series of glowing reviews and seeing that it was ranked at 178 (one above Mu & More people! Mu! AND MORE! There’s not just Mu, there’s More than Mu.) this game was a must have for me, and I thought that when I opened up the box that I was going to be smacked upside the head with one heck of a game. Smacked upside the head I was not.



The components are swell, the game works but the whole thing whimpered out of the box rather than exploded and I’ve been left feeling that I’m missing out on something.

The game is a cinch to learn and to teach. It takes about six seconds. “You move your penguin in any direction and pick up the tile you were just on. You want more fish than me. GO!”

And again I have to stress that I don’t hate the game, I think it works quite well, I really like the components I just feel because of it’s short playing time that it lacks a bit of excitement and in the words of a William Shatner song from an album of his that I own, for some bizarre reason: “I can’t get behind that.”