Isaludo: Ten Modern Solo Games Using a Standard Card Deck
****
When looking into published games that can be stripped down and mocked up using regular playing cards and imagination, I came across Wil Su's compendium of original games (and variants with credits) purpose-built for the standard deck. Not all of them are likely to become new standards, but as a free guide to free games that most people can play right away to pass some time, it restored some faith in humanity. Now go forth and make card sandwiches and kill card zombies that are inexplicably dressed like royalty.
Weaving straights across time and space is beyond my mental capabilities, and I'm not convinced that my efforts fared much better than random chance would. Way to make me feel dumb at the first game, but fortunately the others are easier to manage.
The Sandwich Guy ****Simple, quick and pretty fun, even if you don't have significantly more control over it than Uno. This could become a new standard, and I expect to see it commercialised and unnecessarily repackaged to pretend it isn't just regular playing cards underneath.
Saying that, when I introduced it to my daughter, she immediately dismissed it as "boring" and wanted to play I Doubt It instead.
More interesting and less gruelling maths battles than Regicide. It's not hard to win, but then you're up against the ultimate boss of your personal high score.
This base-under-zombie-siege boss battler gets appropriately tense as the deck starts to run dry, but constant eye-shifting calculations make it kind of annoying.
Four-way The Price is Right, the theme of rude customers butting in line doesn't feel sufficiently savage for this card bloodbath, especially with no Brucie to lighten things up. I've yet to succeed.
Unchallenging, unengaging placement puzzle. There seemed to be no danger of exceeding the various rules of 4 unless I was doing something wrong.
Some of the random narratives contrived for these abstract matching games raise a smile, but this one really did start to feel like I was clearing out a sacred tomb (finders keepers) and was quite fun, if unchallenging.
Like the sandwich one, it's begging for a published version with illustrated traps, treasures and numbered trinkets that only more astute players would realise are just fancy playing cards.
I feel like I've been tricked into practising times tables when I wanted to play a game. I've got Kingdomino for that. This was my least favourite of the bunch.
An overly simple probability-based deduction exercise, I only fell short of the minimum score on the learning playthrough, and beating it was the only real reason to play more than once.
This one actually was commercially repackaged, and the Jacks' unbalanced special powers involve more learning or referencing than most of the others that you can get right into. It's one of the tenser ones, though I managed to succeed with a perfect score on my first play, so it probably won't have the replay value of the trickier ones.
Faves: The Sandwich Guy, Loot the Loop
