|
|
|
'Games Magazine' - April 1997
Family Card Game SET ENTERPRISES,
800 351-7765; $12.00
SIMPLE COMPLEX
....*................
....*................
CHANCE SKILL
Are you one of those rummy players who gets all flummoxed when you can't
decide whether that club 8 should go with the two other 8s or with the
7-8-9 club run? Or is that precisely the type of challenge that makes
rummy fun? If that aspect of the game is what you love/hate about rummy,
you'll be glad/sorry to know that things just got better/worse.
Five Crowns, the beautiful new card game from the makers of SET, is made of two identical 58-card decks--3 through king in each of five suits-- plus six jokers. The game is played in 11 rounds, three cards per player in the first, four in the next, and so on, up to 13 in the last. The idea is to collect runs [three or more cards of the same suit] and books [three or more of the same rank] and go out as soon as possible to try to catch your opponents with lots of loose cards. Each opponent scores the face value of every card that is not part of a SET or a book, plus 50 points for each joker and 20 for each current wild. The lowest score after 11 rounds wins. Jokers are wild, as are cards whose rank is equal to the number of cards dealt that round. (face cards are ranked 11, 12, & 13). That is, in the first round 3s are wild (three cards are dealt); in the second round 4s are wild (four cards are dealt), and so on. In the later rounds, with all those wild cards out there, anything can happen without warning, so efficient card-arranging is crucial. Think of all those points you don't want to get stuck with! - Burt Hochberg, Senior Editor |
