Designed by: Alexander Bernhardt
The curiously-named Skyjo is a fast-moving card game where your goal is to score the lowest, and the numbers on your cards define your score.
Everyone sets up nine cards face-down in a 3×3 grid, and then chooses two to flip face-up. The remaining cards sit in a deck where everyone can reach, and the first player draws the top card. They’ve three options with how they use it: they can swap with a face-up card in their grid, swap it with a face-down card (the replaced card is discarded face-up) or simply reject it entirely. Remember, you’re after low cards whenever possible, but there might be a motive to take a high card: if you ever have three identical cards in the same column, you get to remove them from your grid entirely!
The next player can take the top card from the deck or the first player’s discarded card, and the game continues in this vein until someone reveals their last face-down card. All other players get one more turn, then everyone tots up their score: whoever has the lowest points wins the game (or, in fact, the round: Skyjo suggests you record scores and play more rounds until someone’s score goes over 100: at that point the player with the lowest score wins!)
A little. The card you discard is on offer for the next player, so you can conceivably take a hit in order to stop them completing a matching column. But the overriding flavour of the game is really luck.
Low with 2-4 players, but does start to climb with more. Also when you hit six players (or more) you need quite a large table!
A modicum. There's a lot of luck though; what card will you get from the deck? If you gamble on dumping a face-down card from your grid, will it be a high number (yayy) or a low one (oh no). And there's tiny stream of strategy on rushing the end of the game (or round) or biding your time.
It's a bit of a lottery, but the great thing about a lottery is it's unpredictability. If you like that kind of thing.
1-8
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
Am I wearing my pompous design critique hat, or my backwards baseball cap? One says there are better games that give you more agency, take less table space and feel less of a lottery. But the other knows that Skyjo is good stupid fun and we enjoyed playing it.