Designed by: Behrooz Shahriari
If you’re going to name it A game about selecting seven cards, speedily searching for synergies, then it probably makes sense that the game in question does what it says on the pack – and it does! There’s a little more to it than that, but certainly you’ll select seven cards, rather quickly, and look for synergies: ie, ways to combine them that score points.
Set up involves everyone being dealt a stack of seven cards and nine more laid out in a shared tableau. Each player is dealt three cards to look at and keeps a single one as their starting hand. Then the game begins! There are no turns – it’s a simple matter of grabbing a card you want from the available nine and replacing it with the top card of your stack.
Each card belongs to a suit (eg creatures) and contains a number of elements that might score (eg plants, legs, eyes) with different cards (eg a card that says get a point for every pair of eyes). So the synergising of the title is looking for cards that combine in at least one way to generate points. Once you’ve added a card to your hand you can’t return it to the table, and as soon as any player’s stack is empty, they count down from seven to give everyone else a last few seconds to make card-grabbing decisions. Then the game is over, and anyone who still has any cards in their stack adds them to their hand, and all hands are scored.
Only when someone takes a card you were reaching for. The game plays so speedily though there isn't time to judge what others are after, so any collateral will be inadvertent
None - everyone plays at the same time, and the game can literally be over in 60 seconds!
Combining the cards is easy: they all say what they score points for, so it's just a matter of looking for the best matches. The tricky part is doing it against the virtual clock of someone else suddenly announcing they're done, and giving 7 seconds to finish up...
The slightly manic vibe is always present, but the cards are dealt out (and combine) in numerous ways.
2-6
Players
8+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
This designer has for years been coming up with short and simple game designs that have a 100% playful sense to them: home-made, shrewdly judged, and silly in the best possible fashion. I don't think A game about selecting seven cards, speedily searching for synergies is my favourite of them - that would be the multi-game deck of cards Wibbel++ - but the same sense of frivolous joy is present and correct, and it's so fast and frantic you may want to play several games in a row to determine an 'overall' winner.