Every turn is one choice: which pile?
The rules fit on one card. Pick a pile, draw a card, add it to your total. Red pays the most and holds six of the deck's ten Strike cards. Orange holds three. Green pays ones and twos and holds one. Three Strikes and you stop drawing, but your points stay yours.
Red sharks, orange devils, green koalas: high, medium and low risk.
That one choice carries the whole game. A kid on two Strikes has to decide whether a red 8 is worth the chance of ending their game, or whether to sit in the green pile and collect small numbers.
The odds change in front of you
Every card stays face up, so everyone can see which Strikes have come out of which pile. The risk moves as the game goes. In a two-player demo filmed with The Coffee Apple, an Australian toy shop, the designer points out the moment the red pile became safer than the orange one: red was down to two Strikes and orange still had three. Kids who count the Strikes left in each pile make better choices than kids who draw on hope.
Strikes, numbers, Minus cards, a Double and a Save a Strike.
The special cards add more decisions. You have to announce a Double before you draw, and it only doubles a number, never a Strike. Minus cards cost you points. The one Save a Strike sits in the green pile, which gives a kid on two Strikes a reason to play safe for a turn.
Sue C.'s kids asked for game after game
Sue C., who reviews toys at 60 Seconds Toy Review, gave it five stars and wrote that it looks almost too simple at first, until her kids were hooked and asked to play again and again. Her favourite card was the Double. Teachers who left reviews use it as a short end-of-lesson game in Years 5 to 7. Warren Beckwith tested it with his own students in Western Australia before it went on sale.
The adding is the other half of the game. Totals climb past 20, with Minus cards and Doubles along the way. The designer's tip is to stack your cards into groups that make 10, which turns a long sum into counting tens. A scrap of paper for a running tally helps younger players.
The box fits in one hand, and in a bag for a trip.
A round is quick, and the box goes anywhere
It packs into a bag, plays fast, and works with two players or a table of five. If your kid likes the push-your-luck feel, Flip 7 is the same kind of tension with a bigger deck. For more adding practice in a card game, Clumsy Thief has players make pairs of cards that add up to 100.
Card and box photos: Sue C., 60 Seconds Toy Review.
