Dave Reviews: Spooky Card Magic

Illusion
Look at the pretty colors... look at them... looooook...

How much color did you see WRONG WRONG WRONG

Illusion is a party game for a small party, which is to say it's for a relatively small number (two to five), but also for people who don't have to know anything about games to understand it and better if they're all drinking.

The game is played with a deck of cards, each of which has a unique colored pattern on it. One card is placed face up and set on the table, along with a card from a smaller deck that just has a collection of colored arrows. The first player places one of the patterned cards face up and decides if it has more or less of the color on the arrow than the first card. So, for example, if blue is the color, the player decides if his card has more or less blue than the card on the table. If he thinks it has less, he places it closer to the arrow. If he thinks it has more, he puts it on the far side from the arrow. Simple.

The next player decides if the first player made the right choice. If not, she can challenge (more on that shortly). If she's fine with it, she flips the next card and decides if it has more than both cards on the table, less than both, or should go in the middle. Then the following player decides to challenge or play the next card, and so on.

Once it comes around to a player who thinks the order is incorrect, they can challenge. The card is flipped over; on the back is the percentage of the card that is blue, red, green, or yellow. If any of the cards are out of order, the challenger gets the arrow card, which counts for a point. If all the cards are in the correct order, from lowest percentage to highest, the person whose turn just passed gets the arrow card. In essence, the challenge is to the previous player, saying they made an incorrect judgment either on the card they placed or in not challenging when they had the opportunity. Then whoever wins the challenge starts the next round. Play until one person collects three arrow cards, or just play through the arrow card deck (there are only twelve) and whoever has the most at the end wins.

If it wasn't apparent, this is a game whose simplicity is its strength and weakness. Anybody can understand it and there's no great strategy to it—you can try to figure out the math on when it's good to challenge even if you're not sure there's anything wrong, but there isn't much of an advantage to be gained. Everyone will get what's going on almost instantly, so it's a fun warmup, especially on a game night with some very casual players around. You're not going to play it a ton, though; even if you're extraordinarily fascinated by the game, eventually you'll play so much you start to memorize the patterns and percentages on some of the cards, and that would be a huge advantage, possibly to the point of breaking the game for you.

Basically, if your collection could use a cheap casual game that acts as a good starter to game night when not everyone's shown up yet, this is good. If you already have games like that which you're still playing, you can hold off on buying this.

Score: Three good colors out of four (fuck green).