Skip Bo vs Skip Bo Junior?

Following up on the last post, I also got Skip Bo from burning some "recognition points" at work.  Skip Bo Junior has long been a favorite of ours -- a simple, catchy game with cartoon bugs on the cards.  I have long wondered what made it "Junior".  If that's junior, what did the original game look like?

At first, the original Skip Bo felt weird to us, but then it felt so familiar we had to stop and think what the differences actually were.  Mainly, in Skip Bo, you get a stock of cards (30 each for 2 players, but we went with 20 for a shorter run), a hand of five cards, and four potential discard piles, and the goal is to get all of your stock pile onto the four build piles at the middle of the table.

But that's also exactly what you do in Skip Bo Junior.  But is it?  In Junior, you divide the deck evenly after dealing the Stock piles to each player.  Then we take turns dealing one card onto each of the other player's discard piles, but that was our own house rule or quirk -- I think you're supposed to draw those four discards yourself, in order, with no control over which pile gets which card.  Anyway, you don't have a hand of cards in the Junior version, you just try to clear the Stock pile with whatever discards you are given.  

Oh, and Skip Bo has a wild card, the Skip Bo card.

So, here a simple video of the Skip Bo rules in action.


Build piles at top, two draw piles under that, bottom row is my stock pile and four discard piles


It feels like having control over your discard piles gives Skip Bo another layer of strategy compared to the Junior version.  We found ourselves always putting a discard on top of a higher card, figuring they will end up getting built out in ascending order.  The cards themselves are plain and boring.

Now, for the fun twist.  This is why I enjoy researching these things.  Here's a video explaining how the game was created in Brownfield Texas, that it was actually named after the creator (Minnie Hazel "Skip" Bowman), and how it became such a phenomenon.  How it was sold for a million dollars, what became of the building ... wow.  Thorough reporting in under seven minutes.  It was just a set of three regular decks of cards back then with some custom Skip Bo cards -- the numbers on the back was which deck each card was from.


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