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.

12/24/2025 update: We played Sequence again on Christmas Eve, this time with three players.  Nobody checked the rule book.  We just dove in.  It started off okay, but toward the end, there were only one or two cards we could each use.  We weren't sure about the rule for dead cards, whether that was one card trade per turn.  One player figured they could just keep trading cards until they get the card they need -- clearly that can't be right.  I had a strong section of black chips, ready to make sequences in multiple directions, put my key spots were stolen by jacks or blocked by squatters.  So the other two players got sequences first.

None of us could complete a second sequence, and we gave up because food had arrived.  But it turns out that with three players, you only need one sequence to win.  So ... Anne won retroactively.

This game amplifies just how much cards games are games of chance.  You get the cards you need, or you don't.  Sequence is fun but feels a bit pointless in the end.  I just needed the four of clubs to get two sequences, and drew about 30 times without getting one.