First things first, White Hat offers a base level which you could quite comfortably sit down and play with a family of younger players, as you navigate the internet super highway as some kind of ethical hacker trying to reach the goal of the critical asset. The unboxing of the game gives the impression that you're about to get into something heavy and complicated, but it's more like a Lego set, where the extra rainbow coloured pieces are there for when you understand the basics and you decide to open the other book of instructions. At it's core, White Hat is about trick taking, playing cards to beat the lead hand and then move either yourself onto victory or other players onto traps to lock them down and keep them out of your keyboard fast fingered way.
Unless you play the White Hat card, which turns the tables and the winner is the player who played the lowest hand of cards on that particular round. Considering the White Hat player will normally lead the trick, it forces a reaction element to the game as opposed to potential monotonous long term planning.
The trick winner will then take to the board and move either their own or other players piece one space, which plays like some multicoloured hop scotch, as players can't occupy the same spaces and need to leap frog over each other in order to proceed to the end point goal. Some spaces will spell disaster like the honeypot which will trap your piece for the end of the game, while others will have you dropped right back to the beginning, locked and lost. The board movement helps to create a reason for winning the tricks every round, and also helps to break the main trick taking part up into smaller chunks. It's also rather evil and delightful to be thwarting those around you who had played a delightful run of trick taking rounds, only to see them fall head first into a lockdown situation.
At some point, players will run out of cards to play which will signal the end of the round but if all players end up trapped, or one player reaches the Critical Asset, then that signals the end of the game, and scores are tallied from the remaining 'Trace Token' value left in the players hands, as well as the value the players pieces are currently sitting on. The idea behind this being that hackers will always leave traces wherever they go, so to win, you ideally need to have as few points as possible as you get of the end of the game. It's design choice that I appreciate as it has a direct effect on how the main trick taking game plays out, forcing you to balance trying to win the White Hat tricks while also desperately trying to jettison those cards that will move you up the score track if they are still in your hand at the point of round scoring.
There's more to chew on though. I haven't spoken about the options for changing the spaces on the player board thanks to a selection of optional tiles that can be placed on the main board to switch things up once the game has hit the table a few times. There's the optional tracer mode that brings in an additional seek and destroy threat that acts like a tiny terminator, chasing you all down and sending you to sit in a cell at the FBI. It all adds those little extra touches that add on to White Hats repeat opportunities to grace the table.
The solo mode is relatively solid, a standard level beating your own score in reverse, by trying to land as few points as possible, similar to the main game, but in this case you're playing as all of the hackers, and they move up the board based on how the trick is won. The difference being the amount of control that you'll be offered, and whether or not you're making the decisions to move the pawn players or the robot is. In a design decision which is slightly baffling, the pawns move based on a strange combination of colours which takes some time to get used to and makes you scream to the sky on several occasions WHHHYYYY.
There's a lot on offer here for someone who wants to sit down with a trick taking game that doesn't try to be clever for it's own good, but introduces a couple of clever extras that entice and invite you to get it back to the table again in its tiny condensed box. Special shout out to the size of that box, because in a world where board game boxes seem to be containers for lots of air and very little content, the box for White Hat has you performing a Tetris type puzzle to get all of its colourful pieces and offerings back in the box. I'm not complaining, it's just another reason to doth your hat.
All in all, White Hat offers trick taking with its own interesting twist in how it plays out, it also offers enough variation from the base game in such a small box, its difficult to feel you won't be getting more than your money's worth from the base level box. Is it going to make you love trick taking as a genre? Possibly? Its not going to make you like it less, and that's probably just as important.
Game Design: Ren Multamaki and Thomas Klausner
Solo Mode: Nikolas Patrakka
Graphical Design: Scott Everts, Ren Multamaki
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