A lighthearted cow-tipping game in which aliens are trying to tip cows for bragging rights.

In the first part of the game, players place their cows.
On an 8x8 grid (3 players) or 9x9 grid (2 or 4 players), players take turns placing 12 cow chits of their color, 1 at a time and 1 per cell, inside the fence, which is a 1-cell perimeter. When placing cows, players try to achieve Cow Lock, which is two identically-colored orthogonally adjacent cows. Four cows in a square is called a Bovine Doom Block.

Next, each player places their alien chit on the center square of their edge of the board (on the grid, but outside the fence). They take turns moving the alien up to 3 spaces, and then they may choose to tip cows. Tipping starts from the alien and stops at a Cow Lock -- the alien cannot tip a cow directly into a cow of the same color. The player then collects all tipped cows.

To determine individual scores, each player tallies their cows, subtracting the number of cows of their color from the remaining cows. High score wins.

In the 2-player game, each player uses a single alien marker as normal, but chooses and places cows of 2 colors. Cow Lock and Bovine Doom Block can still only be achieved with cows of the same color.

From the packaging:
In Udder Madness you are an alien engaged in a contest with your alien pals to see who can tip the most cows of your opponents while tipping as few of your own as possible.

Why an alien, you ask? Well there are a couple of reasons.

One reason is that by now, any alien visitors we may have must surely have grown bored with abducting people and examining their nether-regions. So with nether-regions out, and crop circles quickly becoming pass, they're going to need some new mystifying activity... Why not this?

The second reason is that we at Placebo Press could not possibly believe that an actual human being, no matter how depraved or intoxicated, would participate in such an activity outside of the confines of a harmless board game? Hence it must be aliens. I don't think that our logic is flawed here.

Games