Five Crowns

Here is another card game from Set games.  It has almost the same exact rules as their Quiddler game (see the previous post), but here the cards are five suits of otherwise regular playing cards. The first hand starts with three cards and threes are wild, next hand has four cards and fours are wild, up to a final hand of ten cards with tens wild. 

It felt like it dragged a bit on the early hands, where we seemed to just be waiting on either an 8 or a 3 or wild, for example.  Bigger hands had almost too many options, too many wild cards, and seemed to just fall together instead of being built using any kind of strategy.

One of my first hands.

Here, the scoring only uses unmatched cards after one player goes out, with lowest score winning the game.  I never liked games where Jack is 11, Queen is 12 and King is 13, we just used 10 each.  Unused wild cards count 20, unused jokers count a whopping 50, but really, how would you end up not using one?

I ended up grabbing a pair of dice to visually show which hand we were on.  At first I kept a tally on the score sheet, but this way we could both easy see that the current hands should have 5 cards and 5s were wild.  

Reshuffling the discard pile gets pretty unwieldy with a deck of 118 cards.  We tended to keep the deck in two draw piles, which should make no difference to game play.  When the discard pile got thick, we'd put half under each draw pile and reshuffle the two draw piles.  Just a preference, I suppose.

This game was not as interesting to me as its sister game Quiddler, where you try to build words instead of melds of numbers and straight flushes.  We could have just played regular 500 rummy.  I'm not sure the extra color or rules add anything to that.