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Toppo
(search on Board Game Geek)
- Replay Value (1-10): 9
- Fun Factor (1-10): 9
- Worth Buying (1-10): 8
The only components that come with this game is a big deck of cards, each of which has one of six shapes in one of six colors. Three cards are dealt face up to the center o fthe table. The rest of the cards are dealt out to the players, who shuffle them and hold them face down in one deck. This is a speed game where the goal is to get rid of all your cards first. The rules of play are thus: deal out three cards, see if your three cards and the three cards in the center have the "Toppo" property; if they don't, sweep your three cards back onto the bottom of the deck. (The "Toppo" property means that there is a way to put your three cards on the three public cards such that each of your cards shares at least one property -- color or shape -- with the card it is on.) If your cards have the Toppo property, you call out "Toppo", everybody stops, and you demonstrate the property, which not only lets you get rid of three cards, but changes the public cards for everyone else. You may also, without interrupting the flow of the game, put a card that matches a public card in two attributes onto that public card. Finally, to keep the game from getting stuck, players may shuffle their own deck during the frenzy if they so wish, although this usually doesn't happen unless you've gone through your deck a few times without being able to get rid of anything.
The rules take a while to explain and get used to, but once everyone understands them, the game flows rather smoothly, and is pretty addictive to boot. Although some players are naturally going to better than others, it's surprisingly simple to handicap the players (unlike the classic game of Set, which is impossible to handicap in a satisfactory way). One thing that stymied us for a bit was that the shapes had some texture mapping on it that had no gameplay function. But then we deduced that they were there for the benefit of color-blind players. What excellent forethought!
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