Pokémon Chips is a hand management, push your luck game.

Title: Pokémon Chips

Year Published: 2023

Designer: Mathieu Aubert, Théo Rivière

Publisher: Korea Boardgames

Players: 2-5

Game Time: ~15 minutes

Set-up Time: ~2 minutes

Ages: 7+

Theme: Pokémon and Pokémon Trainers

Mechanisms: Hand Management and Push Your Luck

How to win: Score 10 by keeping hold of the right cards that will score at the end of the round, or ‘shoot the moon’ and win a trophy.

Game Description

A Pokémon-themed version of Bag of Chips in which everyone is trying to score valuable Pokémon each round to be the first to collect 10 points or grab one trophy. 

How to play Pokémon Chips

Learn how to play Pokémon Chips in a quick and concise way.

Main Mechanisms

There are only two really. Hand management as you choose which scoring cards to hold round to round. Then push your luck as you may choose to discard cards that WILL score a couple of points for those that MAY gain a lot of points, or even a trophy.

USP

So it’s a remake of an existing game and themed with Pokémon, so that’s not unique either.

However, Pokémon themed existing ‘good’ hobby games are still few and far between.

Theme

Pokémon! But with a bit of focus on the Trainers which isn’t done that much.

Setup & Rulebook

Deal out a trainer, setup the cards and put the tokens in a bag, that’s about it.

The rulebook is in Korean which isn’t great for me. The online ones are good so thank you to the translators.

Components & Artwork

The tokens are clear, and the cards symbology for scoring makes sense. It’s very language independent which helps.

There isn’t really that much of anything in the game.

The art is nice, but it’s Pokémon so it’s hard to get wrong.

Image Source

Ease of Teaching

The game is easy to teach. After 1 round everyone will get it.

Similar Games

Pokémon Safari is another Pokémon themed, ‘good’ hobby game.

Pokémon Chips Review

Positives

A fun and quick game.

The Pokémon theme actually works… kinda.

It looks cute.

I assume getting a trophy is fun, I may never know!

Scoring big is satisfying, but…

Negatives

…it does make sense to go for the guaranteed low points total. As you only need 10, passing on 2 points to risk getting a couple more is rarely worth it.

Getting a trophy is more luck than judgement.

Pokémon Chips Round-Up

A fun game that only last 15 minutes so why not shoot for those big points and see what happens?

Rating: I give it 6/10