LogFAQs > #933466997

63. No Thanks! (2004)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Bidding, push-your-luck, sequence-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 10-15 minutes
Experience: 10-20 plays over 5-10 sessions with 4-5 players (2015-2019)
Previous ranks: 36/100 (2016), 38/80 (2018)

Summary - Your goal is to minimize points taken via cards. There's one card in the center with a number on it (3 to 35), and on your turn you either add a token if you have one (-1 point) to it to pass on it or take it and all the tokens other players dropped. However, any sequence of cards that you assemble scores only the lowest number on it (so 5-6 will score only 5, not 11).

Design - Simple and brilliant, No Thanks! distills decision-making into a binary: do I want the card or not? But a lot weighs into this: How many points are you taking right now? How likely is it to get a connecting piece with future negative points attached to it? If I have the 33 and the 32 is up for bid, should I take the 32 now, or pass and let it collect negative points from other players first? How long can I afford to do that before someone says fuck it and takes it from me? Even if it's bad for me, can I afford to give up a token right now (and risk getting stuck with an even worse number later)? With nearly a third of the deck (nine cards) removed each game, what are the odds that I'll be able to see the cards I need to build the sequence? (This is particularly painful if you're trying to decide whether to get that 19 when you've got 17 showing.)

Due to its filler weight, No Thanks! is going to have a small hole or two. It is luck-dependent. And because of its peculiar brand of player interactivity, different players may see different opportunities: if the player to your right loves snapping up cards, then you'll always be first to be offered cards, and the decisions might not be as interesting. No Thanks! plays like a 6 nimmt! type of game that needs to be iterated to have any meaningful value due to the swinginess of a single hand. And of course there's some spite; since No Thanks! is clearly non-zero-sum, it's always a question if you want to be the one to "take one for the team."

Experience - I haven't played No Thanks! a ton. I haven't played it every year I've been in the hobby, and I don't feel the urge to play it. But it's really reliable as a palette cleanser. Have positive memories of waiting for others to finish a different game with it, or ending a long game night with it, or having it be a breath of fresh air early on when I was overwhelmed with heavy games.

Future - I don't know that I need No Thanks! in my collection but with any group from 3-5, hard to see me turning down a round. There are a lot of games in a somewhat fluid tier here. While NT has rather limited potential to rise, it also wouldn't really fall other than just becoming a bit tired of it, or other games surpassing it.
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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