Wolfgang Warsch is Clever for a fourth time

German publisher Schmidt Spiele has announced Clever 4Ever, the fourth title in the Ganz Schon Clever series of games by Wolfgang Warsch. Ganz Schön Clever, known in the west as That’s Pretty Clever, is a roll-and-write title nominated for the KennerSpiel des Jahres in 2018. Players roll a set of colored dice, then select one, used to fill in spaces on their board in the section of the same color. But the active player will need to discard any dice lower in value than the one selected, making them available for other players. The essence of the series is chaining combos – filling in one section may allow a bonus mark in another section, and so on.

Ganz Schön Clever was followed up by Doppelt So Clever (Twice as Clever), then Clever Hoch Drei (Clever Cubed). A children’s version of the game, Auch schon Clever was nominated for the Kinderspiel this year. The new game, Clever 4Ever appears to use the same general mechanisms, but the nature of each colored dice’s puzzle is still unclear. Previous iterations of the Clever games have been published in the west by Stronghold Games, and there’s no reason to think the fourth will not follow suit. No release date is known at this point, but Essen would not be a poor guess.