Tag Archives: Scrimish

PuzzleNation Product Review: Scrimish

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The best card games are simple. People love War and Poker and Hearts and Go Fish because, at their core, they’re games you can learn quickly and play endlessly. There are no long tutorials or play-throughs, so you can learn all the complexities and rules with ease.

It’s difficult to find puzzly card games that are as accessible and replayable. Scrimish, a card game created by Danny Zondervan and recently funded through Kickstarter, fits the bill nicely. The rules are simple, but the strategy in the actual game is what gives Scrimish major replay value.

[On a very festive battlefield, I’ve finished setting up my cards
(bottom of the frame), while my opponent is still working on hers.]

Scrimish is an elegant mix of War, Chess, and Memory.

Each player gets a set of 25 cards, arranging them into five piles of five cards each, face down. The goal? Find your opponent’s crown card before they find yours.

Then you take turns drawing a card from the top of one of your piles and attacking the top card of one of your opponent’s piles in a one-on-one battle. Here’s where the War aspects begin. You see, each card has a number value, and the higher number wins. The losing card is discarded, and the winning card goes back to whatever pile it came from.

So in every encounter, both players learn something, because even if you lost that attack, you’ve learned the value of one of the cards on top of one of your opponent’s piles.

That’s where the Memory aspect comes in, because you have to remember what cards of your opponent’s you’ve seen. (You can check your top cards or your piles as often as you and your opponent see fit.) Then you can plan other moves and try to uncover their crown card.

You’ve got shield cards to defend with, archer cards to attack with, numbered weapon cards to battle with, and one crown card to defend. So, essentially, you’re playing a miniature game of chess with your opponent, except your pieces are hidden from them.

And that’s what makes for such a satisfying playing experience. You’ve got all sorts of strategy going on, plus chances for misdirection in both your attacks and your placement of cards at the beginning of the game. Do you go out heavy with high numbered cards early, or do you test their defenses with low cards? Do you arrange attack stacks and defensive stacks, or do your spread your resources out across all five stacks?

Plus, every card you attack with is one less you have in your stacks. So you’ve got a resource management aspect as well. All of this gameplay and puzzly potential, with fewer cards than your standard poker deck.

It takes only a few minutes to learn, but all the thought that goes into it makes every game of Scrimish feel fresh and new.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Puzzlesaurus Kickstarterus edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And in today’s post, I’m returning to the subject of puzzly crowdfunding campaigns!

I’ve covered various campaigns for board games, card games, and puzzle projects across the Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdfunding platforms over the years, and today I’d like to share a few more that deserve your attention.

These are some of the cards for Scrimish, a card game so simple and elegant that I cannot believe I haven’t seen this game mechanic before.

Essentially, it’s a chess match with cards. You set up your five piles of cards face down in front of you, hiding a crown card in one of your piles. Then, you play cards against your opponent’s piles in the hopes of revealing his crown card. So strategy, rather than luck, is the name of the game here.

There’s only a day or two left in this campaign, and it’s already blown past its initial goal, so if you donate, at the very least, you’re guaranteed a copy or two of the game. (Sometimes, this is one of the advantages of jumping onto a Kickstarter bandwagon at the eleventh hour.)

Did you know that more dinosaur skeletons were discovered by just two scientists — Cope and Marsh — than by anyone else in history? And did you know that they got so competitive with one another that they actually began damaging dig sites and blowing up fossils in order to sabotage each other?

This ridiculous and amazing period in history is the source material for The Great Dinosaur Rush, a game where you attempt to build a complete dinosaur skeleton while stealthily (and sometimes, not-so-stealthily) combating your opponents’ efforts to do the same.

I’ve been waiting months for this Kickstarter to launch, ever since I first heard about the game, and now it’s well on its way to being funded. Why not take history into your own hands and mess with your friends and fellow scientists while you’re at it?

There are so many more I could cover, all with varying degrees of puzzliness. There’s the card game Master Thief (where you compete with fellow players to rob a museum), the magnetic jigsaw-style Enigma Orbs, a Cards Against Humanity-inspired bounty hunting card game called Skiptrace, and Covalence, a board game where you race to figure out molecular structures!

Heck, there’s even a collection of drinking glasses that link together (called, appropriately enough, Cupzzle)!

I highly recommend taking a little time to surf the puzzle and game pages of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, because you never know what terrific and unexpected products you might help bring to life.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!