LogFAQs > #932638242

105. God's Gambit (2014)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Sequence-building, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 5-10 minutes per hand; 30-40 minutes per game
Experience: 8+ hands over 2-3+ sessions with 4-6 players (2015-2017)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 54/80 (2018)

Summary - As the friend who owns it describes it, "Uno with special powers." You're dealt a hand of cards with ranks and suits (though with considerably cooler, manga-esque art), and when it's your turn, you either discard a card matching either the rank or suit of the top discarded card, or play in front of you any card and activate its ability (determined by rank). The sum of the ranks in front of you and in your hand at the end of a hand is your score, but if you go out first, you always score zero.

Experience - We've played this as a filler a few times. Becoming accustomed to the cards always . I've got a long history of playing card games, though normally trick-tacking games and poker (neither genre is really represented here). But I played those games with a different crowd and in largely different capacities, not as a hobby game.

Design - One reason God's Gambit feels so much more "card game-y" than "hobby game-y" - it is uniform across rounds. Basically, the game is divided into hands, and the "winner" of a hand is the person who goes out first. At the end of a hand, you take your score and add it, and then you just deal out the next hand... which plays out identically to the previous hand. The only continuity between hands is the score, and the game length is some number of hands until someone exceeds some number of points. Relatively few games on this list have this mechanism.

As a result, the story arc of any given game is quite short. I of course love short games and quick decisions and have spent countless hours playing Spades, Hearts, Asshole/Chinese Poker, and the like. But those games have felt like they had a different purpose. When I play a hobby game, I got for uniqueness, and the overall experience of GG doesn't feel that unique, even though the gameplay itself is smooth and the art is trippy.

Future - I mean, sure, if the appropriate friend brings it to the appropriate game night as a filler option. There are a few other games on this list that work similarly, and I think getting to know what each card rank does effortlessly would probably aid this game in rising higher - if it feels as intuitive as those playing card games, then maybe it reaches that seamless level of enjoyment.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness