Sequence

We were at an small family gathering last night and after dinner,  the board games started to come out.  The group decided on Sequence, so we pulled out that big game from a badly smooshed box and tried to get the kinks out of it.  They tried a blow dryer,  even talked about putting it in the dryer to flatten out.  But in the end we just laid it out and started playing, and avoided the bumps as best as we could.

The mat shows card patterns, with two of each card laid out in a maddening disarray.   The game itself is simple enough, just discard a card each turn and put a chip on a matching card space on the big game mat.  You start with six cards and always draw a new card after playing one.  The goal is to get two sequences of five in a row of your color. 

There are a few other rules:
- if all spaces for one of your cards have been taken,  that's a dead card and you can trade in for a different (hopefully playable) card at the start of your turn
- one-eyed jacks are wild
- two-eyed jacks let you remove a chip from the mat

It's not bad.  Good for some mindless card flipping, although just playing a card game with the deck probably would have been more fun.  Sequence sounds like it would be more fun, but it's all about what cards you draw.   If you don't have the cards to block an opponent you can only watch as they slowly build their winning pattern.  Maybe you can finish your pattern first? Not if you don't have the right cards.

We played one game with two teams of two and our team won the game.  We thought about starting a second game but by then Scrabble came out but we didn't have the extra hour to play.