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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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As those of you who regularly look at this blog may have noticed, I have a possibly sick obsession with the Take It Easy family of games. Despite the fact that they have about as much interaction as a game of Bingo, I still enjoy them. Some of my friends who come from a war game background and don’t think a game is a real game unless you can make the other player cry view the family of games as a social activity, not a game but I’m still calling them games.
And those same guys still like playing them 
Over the past couple of years, I have been exploring games in this unofficial family, whose central mechanism could be described as “Bingo, only with actual strategy!” While they are the text book examples of multi-player solitaire, I have still clearly had a lot of fun with them.
And, wouldn’t you know it, I actually found one that gives you a way to stick it to the other players 
Mosaix is a tiny little game that I probably never would have even heard of, if I hadn’t been looking for games like it. It consists of four dice, four shiny player boards and some dry erase markers to write with. There’s not much to it and I was reluctant to spend the money on it until I realized that the game was going to haunt me until I finally got it.
Like Take It Easy, it’s one of those games where all the players have their own separate board that is completely isolated from everyone else’s. The only way that two boards can interact is if you set one on fire and toss it on the other. On any given turn, a pattern is generated and everyone has to draw that pattern some place on their personal board.
So, nothing exciting. If you’ve played Take It Easy, you know just what I’m talking about. If you have never played a game like this, it will take you two minutes to figure it out.
Ah, but there is a clever bit. The four dice have three symbols on them, twice on each die since they are six-sided dice. The active player rolls the dice. Then, the player chooses how to arrange the dice to form a four square pattern of symbols. The other players can rotate (but not flip) the shape that the active player comes up with. They can even have some of the squares sticking off the edge of the board (and thus not be used) as long as at least one square is filled. However, they MUST use the shape that the active player has stuck them with.
That might not sound like it changes up things too much but it actually makes a huge change in this kind of game.
For one thing, having the option to create the shape gives the active player a lot more control than any other game like this I have played. In Take It Easy, the tile that gets drawn is the tile that gets drawn. You have no choice but to place it and suffer.
For another thing, you can actually choose a pattern that will block another player and mess up their board. Most of the time, you’ll probably want to create a pattern that helps your own scoring but in almost every game I’ve played, I have seen at least one point (usually near the end, when boards are pretty full) in which the active player chose a blocking move instead and that often made a big difference.
Amusingly enough, another effect of this game mechanic is that, unlike Take It Easy which can be played with as many players as you have boards, you really wouldn’t want to play Mosaix with more than four players. Otherwise, people wouldn’t get enough turns as the active player
The scoring is also clever. The game ends when any player cannot fit the shape onto the board, even with the option of having part of it stick out. At that point, you count up each group of five or more symbols, crossing out every symbol that isn’t part of such a group. You then multiply the total number of each symbol by the number of groups you have of that symbol. That’s your score.
Among other things, the scoring REALLY rewards being able to make multiple groups of a symbol. It definitely makes trying to create multiple groups a priority.
However, Mosaix’s big selling point is the power of deciding what the shape will be. I haven’t actually met anyone who doesn’t like playing Take It Easy but, if I did, I would say that Mosaix is the Take It Easy kind of game for that person. It really breaks the mold I have come to expect for the Take It Easy family, making it a distinctive but still enjoyable game.
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