Designed by: Emma Larkins
Abandon All Artichokes is a card game with a difference: it takes the basic premise of deckbuilding games – each player starts with a basic deck of cards and slowly upgrades it over the course of the game – and tweaks it: here, although you are improving your deck (with vegetable cards), your starter deck (artichokes!) are all useless, and only by shedding them can you win the game.
Everyone begins with ten artichoke cards. On the table the vegetable cards (made up of non-artichoke vegetables) are placed, with the top five flipped face-up for all to see in what’s referred to as the garden row. Turns are simple: you’ll have a hand of five cards (all artichokes at the start) and you claim a single card from the row, and then play as many cards as you can from your hand. On your first time, that’s obviously only going to be one card. As the game progresses, however, you’ll get more: artichokes do nothing, of course – they’re just in your way – but all the vegetable cards have a special action they do, allowing you to get rid of artichokes in your hand (‘composting’ them) or snaffle cards from other players, or manipulate your deck in some way to try and maximise the chance of drawing a hand of five non-artichoke cards.
Once you’ve played any cards you can, all played and any unplayed cards go into your discard pile: when your draw deck runs out, your discards are shuffled to form the new draw deck. The game continues until the moment anyone draws a hand of five non-artichoke cards, at which point they have successfully abandoned their artichokes and claim their vegetable-based victory.
A few cards do target other players, although not horrendously - it's not the overriding sensation of the game.
Low to moderate, depending on player count. At the start, turns are going to be very fast...
...but they do slow down as players find themselves with more options, and opportunities to combine cards in different ways
There's in-built variation in a game that flows from a shuffled deck, but Abandon All Artichokes also offers some strategic flex as well in how you approach the game.
2-4
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
The more you play Abandon All Artichokes the more the initially-chaotic stuff-happening feel is subsumed by a sense of control - albeit perhaps not as much as you'd like - and opportunity. Do you focus on shedding artichokes as much as you can, or take another tack and try and swamp them in other cards to the point where you're increasingly likely to draw the five you need? It's simple, but clever, and I think the presentation is rather delightful. That said, deck-building as a concept isn't universally-familiar, so it might feel alien to players coming direct from checkers or Monopoly - a little opaque at first. And the ending can feel somewhat arbitrary, as though a bell has rung to say playtime is over. The latter reason is why it wasn't really a big hit with us, but >insert your own reason< why we're totally wrong here, because Abandon All Artichokes has had rave reviews elsewhere online. For GNG, it's one we respect, rather than demand to play.