Cards4You 2010

Cards4 you is a set of 37 cards (cards numbered 1 to 7 in 5 colors and two wild cards, „Jokers”) published with 4 rulesets, one of them being Top Trumps (the cards with franchise themes have all the necessary information printed on them for this) and three of them being never-before published designs by Reiner Knizia. The games included:

1. Aufwärts (Upward, age 4+, in some editions 5+) Players race to empty their hands. In turns, players attempt to play a card in a strict ascending order: you can only place a 2 on a 1, a 3 on a 2 etc. (card colors do not matter) with the exception of playing a 1 on a 7 (the highest card) on the discard pile. Jokers are used as wild cards. If unable to play, players draw a card from the draw pile. The player who gets rid of all their cards first wins the game.

2. Trumpfen (Top Trumps, age 6+)

3. Zwölf (Twelve, age 7+) A game resembling the designer’s Foodie Forest and Poison with some twists and important differences. It is also a sort of a trick-taking game, but instead of everybody playing one card and seeing which one wins the trick, everybody takes turns adding cards until the total would add up to more than 13 (you can’t place a card when the total would increase over 12) and the player who can’t add a card takes the whole pile. But the total grows only when a player plays a card that is of a different color than the last card played. And when a Joker is played, the total goes back to zero again. In the end of a round, your score is the total of the cards collected (the less the better). After a pre-determined number of rounds the player with the lowest score wins.

4. Hamstern (Hoarding, age 8+) A simplified Cheeky Monkey-like game with cards drawn from a deck instead of a bag (and cards in the discard deck are reused later) and two wild cards. On a turn, a player may draw cards until either (1) he chooses to stop or (2) he draws a number that he has lying in front of him from a previous draw this turn. In this latter case, he discards all new cards in front of him and the next player then takes his turn. In the former case, he keeps the cards (in the order they were collected. If a player draws a number that matches the number on top of an opponent's deck AND/OR the card on top of the open discard deck in the middle, the player can steal this card, adding it to the top of the deck currently in front of him. The player with the most cards in the end wins the game.