The Award-winning card game "The Game" is an incredibly simple, yet surprisingly fun card game. Created by Steffen Benndorf, it was 2015 best card game and solo game nominee. It's cool for a number of reasons:
- It's a fun, cooperative game - you're working together instead of against each other.
- It's flexible, you can play by yourself or up to 5 people.
- There is no text, only numbers, so it's not language dependant.
- It's a small box, easy to carry on trips.
- Games are quick and don't require a lot of room to play.
If you have some time to kill on a trip, or anywhere for that matter, it's an easy game to whip out and have a little fun. Although you can play it with a group, I'd say there are many other games that are better party games. To be clear, I think it's most fun as a 1 or 2 player game.
To setup the game, you lay down the four setup cards, 2 are labeled with the number 100 and 2 are labeled with the number 1. The goal of the game is for you and your partner(s) to lay down the other 98 cards in the deck on the table. If you get all of them down, you win.
The deck is simple and besides the setup cards just consists of a deck numbered 2-99. You and your partner have a hand of 7 cards, and you take turns laying down at least 2 cards each. You have to discard your 2 cards on 1 or more of the 4 setup cards: on the "1" setup card you lay down increasing numbers up to 99, on the "100" setup cards you lay decreasing numbers down to 2. That's it.
Bonus: Sully loves it
The trick is that you have to lay down cards each turn, so it's always an issue that you don't have the right numbers in your hands to lay down the next consecutive number on any of the piles, so you end up skipping numbers. You can communicate with your partner but can't say exact numbers you have. It's very difficult to lay down all the cards; the box even says that if you're left with less than 10 once you can't lay down any more it's an excellent result.
There's a rule about resetting the piles 10 numbers back that helps you and makes the game more fun but I won't go into detail.
It's a challenging game, and the communication aspect makes the game especially fun. The simple rules make it accessible to everyone, and the small package makes it playable anywhere.
If you're looking for comparable games, I would compare it to the Japanese card game Hanabi, also a very fun simple, cooperative card game(in which you and your partner are trying to make a fireworks display-very interesting game).
Hope you enjoyed,