Skyjo ... on a hotel bed

I was trying to burn through the last of my birthday gift cards this week and stopped at Barnes & Noble again.  Gotta go where the gift cards take you.  I got book 7 of the Expanse and a little card game called Skyjo.  I almost didn't pick it up because it looked like Uno without the fun cards, or just another Skip Bo.  I watched a how-to-play video last night and Skyjo sounded like a quick learn.  We brought it to the hotel where we were planning to stay out of town on July 4th to avoid the fireworks noise that always upsets the dog.

Again, the hotel had no place to actually play a board game.  There was a table about two foot by four but with only one chair.  Again, we thought about gaming at one of the tables down in the lobby, but then people would walk by and ask bothersome questions.

It turns out that Skyjo can be played by two players on a firm hotel bed.  Each players gets 12 cards, which they put face down in a grid of 3 rows, 4 columns.  Then choose any two cards to turn face up.

Then, each turn is simply drawing a card from the draw pile or discard pile and replacing one of the cards in your grid, trying to get the lowest total.  If you draw from the discard pile, use it directly and discard the card being replaced.  If you draw from a face-down draw pile, you can either replace a card sight unseen or discard the card you drew, but then you must turn one of your other cards face up.

The only other important rule is that if you get three of the same number in any column, discard the entire column.  This is called a triplet.  That's a key way to lower your overall total.

There are a few other rules about scoring multiple hands and playing to 100 points, but we like to take each hand as its own thing in a game like this.

It was actually more fun than expected.  It felt a lot like Low Down, which we covered a few months ago, but without the cards that complicate things.  Here, you just draw cards and try to lower your score.  You may end up being forced to throw out three of your -2 cards.  Within a few hands, we were already getting much lower scores.  I think I managed to cancel a triplet in every game, with two triplets in one game.  It should feel more like chance, but things happen.  Some turns you can shed 6 to 10 points easily, and other turns you get stuck with 8 more.  Sometimes, your play puts a low card on top of the discard pile that the other player can grab.  It's even worse when you replace a face-down card that uncovers a card the other player needs to complete a triple.  Oops.

If you're in a rush and you grab a card before the other player is done discarding the card you needed, slow down.

Part of the Uno feel comes from the bright card colors, and I wondered if this deck could be used for an Uno-like game matching numbers and colors, but it turns out there are no suits of 1-to-10 (like in Skip Bo) either.  The cards are in fact color coded on a kind of heat scale.  You want to shed the red (hot) cards and get more of the low-valued cards in cooler colors.

I wondered why there were SO MANY cards in the deck, but the box says it can be played with 8 players, so that would need 96 cards plus a deck to draw from after that.  This is simple and fun, with enough variety to keep us entertained for a while. 

I see from the maker's website that there are two more games in this series: Skyjo Action and Skyjo Junior.

This is a new favorite of ours.  It just flows so well with those 3 or 4 rules.  There's really nothing to argue about.  Sure, it's a card game, so it's mostly luck of the draw, but it's a fun little challenge to drop points as quickly as you can.  Each hand is only going to last 10 or 12 draws.