Skip Bo Junior

We wanted to spend some time outside under our gazebo, so I grabbed some small games we had not tried before.  The first was Skip Bo Junior.  It looked like a goofy kids game, and those can be a lot of fun.  We have never played Skip Bo (Senior), so we knew nothing about this version.

The Junior version is just a matter of making sequential stacks of 1 to 10 and trying to get rid of your cards.  The art is a bunch of funny and cheerful bugs numbered 1 to 10 with a ? (wild card).  You start with a stack of 10 cards face down -- this is your stockpile.  Flip the top card face up.  At first you have to picture three face-up cards next to your stockpile and four playable spots in the middle of the table where you build stacks.

The game play was smooth and easy to learn, and a lot of actual fun.  More fun then I expected from looking at the box and thinking, "Oh, another game where you stack cards from one to whatever."

Each round, you are dealt three face-up cards side by side next to your stockpile.  If you had unplayed cards in any of those piles, the new cards cover them.  Then you try to deal your cards in order into the four stacks in the middle of the table.  That's it.  You can start a new stack with a 1 or ?, and after playing a 10, the stack is discarded.

It gets into a friendly but energetic pace.  What makes it work is that sometimes you can't play any cards, and the next round you might be able to make a run of 6 or 8 cards in a row.  So you never feel out of the game, since your opponent will probably play some cards you needed.

As soon as a player plays the last card from their stockpile, they win the hand.

We transitioned into a personal variation where instead of having one dealer deal to the both of us, we each held half the deck, and dealt those three new cards to each other.  We could have dealt ourselves cards from our own half deck, of course, but that was not as fun as tapping the table and saying "hit me" (once in a while) and getting the new cards dealt to us.  So nobody got stuck being the dealer.

This was a keeper for us.  Sometimes we want a simple, kinda funny card toss.