The Game Review

Hey, it’s a review of The Game! This was a smash hit from 2015, but does The Game hold up in 2022? Let’s take a look!

For The Game review, I’m rating this a Buy. The Game really is a highly addictive card game about cooperatively placing different numbered cards in rows in an attempt to get rid of all of them. It’s fun, challenging, and plays in a really short amount of time.

The Game Overview

Oh, I love this game, and I can’t wait to dive in. So, let’s get to the back-of-the-box facts and then onto the rest!

Back-Of-The-Box Facts About The Game

• Player Count: 1-5
• Time To Play: 20 minutes
• Age Range: 8 and up
• Difficulty: Beginner/Easy
• Price Range: $10-$15
• Release Year: 2015
• Publisher(s): Pandasaurus Games
• Designer(s): Steffen Benndorf
• Artist(s): Kwanchai Moriya and Jason D. Kingsley
• Where To Buy: Amazon, Pandasaurus Games

What Comes In The Box?

The Game comes with 102 cards and one rulebook, and that’s it!

Theme

There isn’t a theme for The Game. Normally, this would bother me because I love themes in games, but here it works. In my opinion, card games do quite well without themes (although they can do well with them too), and the cool art helps The Game too, but we’ll get to that later.

How To Play The Game

To start The Game (I’m going to be doing this a lot with The Game because it’s too much fun not to), take the two cards with ones on them and the two cards with 100 on them and place them in a vertical line. Each of these is the beginning of a new row.

Then deal everyone six cards for a three-, four-, or five-player game, seven cards for a two-player game, and eight cards if you’re playing by yourself. The rest of the cards go in a face-down pile within easy reach.

To play, you must place at least two cards from your hand to the right of any of the four rows. If you want, you can place more than two, but two are required each and every time you play.

However, you only place your cards one at a time, and you can place them in any row you want. Also, you can only place cards in the two rows starting with the cards with 100 on them (from here on called the 100 rows) in descending order, and you can only place cards in the two rows starting with the cards with one on them (from here on called the one rows) in ascending order.

What that means is cards in the 100 rows have to be a smaller number than the cards before them. So, if the last card in a 100 row is an 89, you can only place a card that’s 88 and below. On the other side of the equation, if the last card in one of the one rows is an 89, you’d have to place a 90 or above.

The Twists To The Game

There are two twists to the game that take what would’ve been a simplistic card game and turn it into a fun brain-burner.

One twist is that you can communicate with the other people around the table, but you can’t tell them any information that would help them figure out the exact numbers of the cards in your hand. When I’ve played, we’ve followed the suggestion of the rules, which states you can say something like, “Don’t place on this pile here.”

The second twist is called the Backwards Trick. Let’s say the last card on a 100-row is that 89 card, and let’s say you have a 99 in your hand. Normally, you couldn’t play a card that’s a higher number than 89, but you can play 99 because it’s exactly 10 higher. Doing this allows you to play even more cards in that row!

As an alternative, say the 89 is in a one row. In that case, you’d have to play a 79 because it’s exactly 10 away from the 89.

This Backwards Trick rule adds an interesting layer of strategy to how you play your cards, but The Game doesn’t make it easy because sometimes you just get a bad hand of cards and you know you’re going to mess up the numbers, but you have to play something!

It is such an awesome game, one of the few games that calls itself highly addictive, and I agree (but I’m getting ahead of myself here).

How To Beat The Game

You can only ever beat The Game if you play all 98 cards between you and the other players. If you’re unable to because you can’t play any more cards, then you count all the cards left in your hands and in the draw pile. If you have 10 or fewer cards, according to the rulebook, that’s an excellent result.

The Game Review

The Game has only been around since 2015. As someone who’s played The Game, that feels crazy. That’s because, to me, it feels like a modern classic. Let’s finally get into why.

Art

The Game’s art is difficult to describe, but it does two things well: functionality and allure.

The first, functionality, is extremely important to The Game (by the way, I just lost THE GAME – if you don’t know what I mean by this, you’re lucky) because it helps you make sense of all the cards on the table and in your hand.

The art is functional because every 10 cards have a different art, which also includes different colors. This helps them stand out from each other and makes it easier to develop strategies based off of them.

The second, allure, adds this interesting element to the game where you feel like you’re playing with something forbidden. It might just be me, but when I look at the art in the game I get the feel of something otherworldly, symbols not meant to be deciphered by man. It’s a really cool look that I dig quite a bit.

Components

Yeah, you’re only getting 102 cards and a rulebook with The Game, but the cards are good quality. They have rounded corners, are a standard size, and feel great in your hands. Plus, the rulebook is easy to read.

Theme

Still no theme! Haha.

Gameplay

This game plays fast. It really does take about 20 minutes, maybe 30 if it’s your first few times or if you’re playing with folks who struggle to make decisions with board games. Before you know it, it’ll be your turn again.

The Game: My Rating

As always, I rate games on a scale of Don’t Buy, Wait For A Sale, or Buy. It should be obvious by now, but The Game is an absolute Buy for me.

I bought The Game on a whim at Target (isn’t it cool we’re getting board and card games like this at Target in 2022 now?!) and because it was cheap. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I’d heard of it before but didn’t know much about it.

I brought it over to a friend’s house who I play games with when I can, and it was an instant hit. As soon as we were done playing the first time, we played a second, then a third.

We never beat The Game once, but we were entranced with how it played. It was fast, made you think, and strategize with each other, and it did have this feeling of you against The Game, like you were going up against a supercomputer at the end of a movie or something.

I can’t say enough good things about The Game. It deserves to be in everyone’s collection, and I definitely think families could play this with their kids provided they were around that eight or older range.

Did You Know?

(Each time you refresh the page you will get a new “Did You Know” fact!)

Did you know that there’s such a thing called a pop-o-matic bubble? I looked it up and discuss which board game features the Pop-O-Matic Bubble!

Conclusion: The Game Review

I love The Game. I don’t know where it would fall in my favorite games of all time, but I have to think it’d be pretty up there. And I look forward to playing this one again, and I hope you’ll get a chance to do the same too.

Speaking of which, if you get a chance to play The Game, let me know what you think and why in the comments below!

And, as always, keep on gaming, fellow board gamers.