Designed by: Prospero Hall
PUSH is a fast-moving, luck-pushing game of collecting cards of various colours.
Set-up is simple: shuffle the cards and place them face-down on the table. Choose a starting player by whatever means necessary, and begin!
Let’s say the starting player is you. On your turn, you draw cards from the deck, one at at time, and flip them over. The cards have a number (1-6) and a colour (red/blue/green/purple/yellow) and you can make, on the table, as many columns of cards as there are players in the game. You can stop drawing whenever you like, and you’ll be first to choose a column – so you can take the one with the highest numbers in – before the other players take a column as well. Once this has happened, your turn is over.
But as you may have guessed, there are some factors at play that might ruin your plans. Firstly, each column can only contain one of each number and one of each colour. If you draw a card and can’t legally place it in any column, you’re bust! Now you not only get no column at all on your turn, but you have to roll a coloured die, and if you have any cards of the colour it lands on these are lost!
Second, there are some roll-the-die cards in the deck too, and you can poison the well of columns by mixing them in when you flip them (just like standard cards though, if each column already has one of these cards and you draw another, you’re bust!).
You can mitigate the swingy nature of busting and implosive die-rolling by choosing not to flip cards on your turn: instead, you can bank previously-claimed cards by flipping all of a particular colour face-down, protecting them from loss.
Finally, also in the deck are switch cards. Normally after the active player has claimed a column, the other players claim in clockwise order around the table. A switch card doesn’t go into a column, but changes this hierarchy to anti-clockwise instead – and a second switch card will change it back again! After all cards have been claimed from the deck, players count up the number values of every card claimed, and the highest wins.
Very much a push-your-luck game, hence the name, PUSH beguiled me with its retro, Uno-esque colours. It's a good game to break out with those fearful of modern games, because it looks like something that's been lying around in a cupboard since the 70s, and it can be learnt while playing, which is always a good thing. The enormous swings of luck probably outshine any of player agency, but who cares - it's a quick, silly and fun card game.
Little ones could feel a little hard done by when the die comes a-calling. But it's more fickle fate than malice.
Very low.
Low. It's a game of luck-pushing, though you do need to consider - if you keep drawing cards - how much of your not-going-bust is actually helping your opponents instead of yourself!
It's not a game with a huge amount of depth or variety, but for a fast family game it ticks the box.
2-6
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
Ground-breaking, unique, inspiring? Not really. PUSH isn't a game where you'll go away rethinking your moves or considering subtle stratagems for next time. But it's one of those games that can function with both family and friends - simple enough to teach to young kids, luck-based enough to be a leveller for all ages, portable enough to take to the pub and just raucous enough, perhaps, to demand one more game.