Low Down

This was another card game that had been sitting around for a few weeks.  The setup is simple: each player is dealt 9 cards, then each player makes a 3x3 grid of face-down cards and flips any two of them face up after that.  Between the players is the draw pile and discard pile.  The point is to get the lowest score at the end.  That's it.  The cards range from 0 to 10, with a few multicolored -5 cards thrown in.


The card dynamics of this game are really interesting.  You can draw a card from the draw pile or the top discard.  Then either replace one of your cards (face up or face down) with the new card (face up), or if you pulled from the draw pile you can choose to discard the card and peek at one of your face down cards instead.  So there is a bit of a memory game going on.

There are black "action cards" which let you peek at any card from any player, or swap any two of your cards, or swap any card of yours with an opponent card of your choice.  Or you can play them in your layout at their face value.  You don't get to look at a face-down card when you replace it, just hope you peeked at it before and remember correctly.

The most interesting move in the game is when you have a row, column, or diagonal where all three cards are the same color -- you can take those three cards out of the game, and they no longer count as points for you.  Which goes against the grain or grumbling about all high cards and discarding them, since it you draw a red 10 and you already have a red 3 and 4 lined up, you can swap the 10 into that space and remove the 3,4, and 10, taking 7 points out of your total.

We played each hand as a separate game, and whoever came up lowest won.  Shuffle and deal again.

Technically, this is a multi-hand game that plays until one player reaches 50 points, at which time, the player with the fewest points wins.

This game managed to offer a surprising number of possibilities without being complicated.  We kept having unexpected sequences come up, like getting a swap card and stealing a face-up -5 from Anne only to have her steal it back again next turn.  Or, since the -5 cards match all colors, I had a column of -5, red 5, -5 and stared at it wondering it if would be better to keep it or take those three cards out of play.  It added up to -5 so I kept it, but we could both imagine cases where you would want to pull those aside.

On our second hand we already wondered about variations.  Shouldn't a row/column/diagonal of three of the same numbers also count as a set and be pulled out?  And ... do the black action cards count as a color for these 3-of-a-kind pulls?  They are usually low values (0, 1 or 2) but they are still points that could be pulled.

Another keeper.  Very dynamic, with more surprises than expected.  It also lends itself to a fast pace where players are going to make mistakes and discard cards the other player needed.