Had anyone else's daughter (or perhaps a few Steemians) become obsessed with LOL Surprise dolls? My then 7 year old daughter received one as an early Christmas present around Thanksgiving, and then that became the focus of what she asked for for Christmas. She got a few more of the dolls, and then decided for her birthday, which is in January, she wanted her party to be LOL Surprise themed. My wife even went so far as to decorate her cake with them.
One of the things she got for Christmas is the Ruckus Card game. In it, there are 12 sets of 6 cards each, featuring some of the characters from the doll series.
The goal of the game is to first collect matching sets of these cards, lay them down in front of you, then steal other people's sets using the single non-matched cards in your hand. This continues until no more stealing or matching can happen, and then everyone gets a new card. More stealing happens, then another card for everyone. Repeat until the cards are all gone.
This game has some problems. It purports to be a crazy free for all type game, but the rule about waiting until everyone had made all of their moves and then giving everyone just one card runs contrary to this goal. We tried giving several cards at a time, but that still had the problem of stopping play. We had the best luck with me just passing out cards continuously, some I could keep up with the matching and stealing and be the dealer at the same time.
But this highlighted another problem with this game. Since there are 6 cards of each character, whoever plays the 6th card in the set as a steal ends up with the whole set and the points. So it took my 10 year old son about a minute to figure out that if you save your cards and do your steeling last, you have a big advantage. So we had to add another house role that you can't sandbag and wait to steal until everyone else is done.
Even with these modifications, it's still not a very good game. But it doesn't matter to my daughter. It's got LOL Surprise stuff on it, so she loves it. And wants to play it. Every. Single. Day.
