My Hedgehog Is Faster Than Your Hedgehog

Stay Out of the Tar Pits in Igel Argern

Racing hedgehogs – that’s what the fun board game called Igel Argern is all about. Your hedgehogs are actually wooden disks, which is a good thing, because it would probably be impossible to stack two, three, four, or more of them if they were almost any other shape.

You start Igel Argern by taking turns stacking your disks on the home column of the board. Your goal is to be the first to get at least 2 of your 3 hedgehogs across the finish line at the far end of the board before anyone else.

On your turn, you roll a single die to determine which of the 6 rows you must move a hedgehog in. A hedgehog only moves one space per turn. Before you move a hedgehog forward, you may optionally move one of your own disks up or down a row, keeping it in the same column.

When moving a hedgehog forward, you’d normally prefer to move your own disk. However, that may not always be possible. If you roll a 4 but don’t have a hedgehog in row 4 (and can’t get one there using your optional vertical move), you’re out of luck. What’s more, if any of your opponents does have a disk in row 4, you must move one of theirs forward instead.

In the picture above, you can see that some of the squares are black. We call these black holes because, if a hedgehog moves into one, he must remain there until everyone’s hedgehogs have reached that same column. At that point it’s as if the black square turns yellow, and the hedgehog is free to move again.

Igel Argern comes with instructions for 40 variants. Most of these were submitted to the publisher by owners of the game.

Igel Argern is a racing game that uses a die in a different way than most roll and move games. Red Herring is also a racing game that uses dice, so if you like Igel Argern, you might want to read the next post about Red Herring too.

Check the price of Igel Argern (and Tante Tarantel on Amazon.