Designed by: Anja Wrede,Christoph Cantzler
Zogen is a high-pressure game where the first to be rid of (most of) their cards wins a round, and the overall winner is decided after a set number of rounds. It’s one of those cheeky Oink games in a little box that comes with nice bits and has slightly oddball scoring.
The game itself is slightly reminiscent of Dobble – there’s some pattern recognition going on, under intense time pressure. Each player has a hand of cards with the top one only visible. A single card is placed centrally – showing a number of microbes – and everyone instantly tries to get rid of their cards by adding them to a central stack. You can only add a card if you have one less or one more microbe than the microbes present on the top card – assuming so, you can slap it down (and that can mean playing a card with no microbes at all!)
But there are four microbes, and the types must match as well, so it’s not as simple as adding/subtracting by one. If anyone thinks a player has placed illegally – accidentally or otherwise! – they can shout Zogen, and the game pauses to investigate. If the challenger was correct, the player who played illegally must pick up the stack and add it to their hand. If the call of Zogen was incorrect, then the challenger gets the cards instead. And so on and so on until one person has gotten rid of all but three of their cards – zero is probably asking too much – at which point the round ends, and scores are tallied based on how many cards you have left – the fewer the better.
Plenty, but it's not targeted so hard to take anything personally. It's more the Take That of feeling too slow, or quite likely completely bamboozled by it all.
None
The rules are easy-peasy. The burning here isn't processing or optimizing, it's thriving under pressure.
It depends if you need a lit down or not.
2-6
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
Well, we've rated it three stars because although both my family and gaming pals detested Zogen, I can see why some people will utterly love it. But those people - in case you're not yet sure if you're one of them - will be those who like both the intensity of that think-fast/move-fast time pressure - even more pronounced here than Spot It - and the raucousness the game seems to encourage. They're generally a bit of a miss for me, unfortunately, but as always with Oink games, it's a both a quirky game and beautifully presented - as not really justified by our picture: it's quite a hard game to stop and take photos of!