Designed by: Andrew Looney,Kristin Looney
You’ve probably seen some version of Fluxx somewhere – it has been rethemed a number of times: Zombie Fluxx, Firefly Fluxx, et cetera.
It’s a simple game in one respect: you begin with three cards (dealt randomly) and on your turn you pick up and card, and play a card. The catch is that the card you play may well change the rules. Play a Goal card and it has a set of criteria that determines the winner – until another Goal card is played, which will supersede it. The criteria on the goal cards will (probably) be a player having a number of Keeper cards in play – these are items that you simply play in front of you and hope they are going to match a goal card. You can also play Action cards (each one does a thing) and, the thing that has probably made Fluxx so ubiquitous: the New Rule card: when one of these is played, the basic rules of pick one/play one are amended or superseded to incorporate the new rule: and as play continues more and more rules come into play (there is a Reset card that clears all the additional rules out again!)
As a result of all these changing goals/rules (plus the potential for you version of Fluxx to have further variants) the game gets increasingly chaotic, until somebody suddenly realises they meet the criteria for the current Goal card: they win!!
There is a little Take That - cards allow you to steal, for instance - but the game mostly is a celebration of confusion.
Nearly zero. Anyone slowing the play should be booted out, as Fluxx is designed to play quickly.
Minimal!
If you like the chaos of it, why not?
2-6
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
I find the experience of manufactured chaos just a bit dull - if I want chaotic gameplay then tactile experience of Riff Raff or Bandu or the luck-pushing likes of Pairs or Dead Man's Chest bring more fun (and potential for frustrated hilarity) than peering at text on a card and then looking around the table to see how it affects other cards. But obviously that's just me; and Fluxx's ongoing presence in games shops everywhere shows it has a place at many peoples' tables.