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DarkMagicianBob's Five Crowns (Other)
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| [February 6, 2016 08:42:46 PM]
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Here I am going to analyze the card game Five Crowns. I will be listing some of the pros and cons and meta-mechanics about this game and how they contribute to the overall experience. This will be done by describing two different playthroughs of this game that happened and could theoretically happen.
First, I will be explaining the rules. Five Crowns is a simple rummy-esque game where your goal is to get rid of all of your cards. There are five suits (correlating to five crowns) which have all symbols that are normally part of a deck's suit in addition to the star symbol. The cards go from 3 to King (13), and these have one duplicate each, and there are also six Joker cards. Each round, a new number is considered the wild card (in addition to the always wild Jokers). Wild cards can be used to fill in the spot of any card of any suit and value in a set. You start from 3 cards all the way to 13 cards. And every round you start with 3 all the way to 13 random cards (to correlate with the currently wild card).
In order to get rid of your cards they must be sorted into sets that are at least 3 card's in size. The sets can either be 3 (or larger) of the same number or a straight of the same suit. For example, if the round calls for 4 cards you must have 4 cards in the set or else you can't go out. The person who's currently "it" can either pick a card from the face-down deck that can be used to replace one of the cards they currently possess or select the current face-up card from the stack of discarded cards. The player doesn't have to use the card they pick up but that's an option. The player must have the same number they start out with as in the beginning.
As soon as somebody goes out, they have 0 "bad" points to add to their score and the players that come after them have one more turn to help keep their round’s score to a minimum. Any cards that are not part of a set get added to their score. In addition to the obvious scores of 3 to 13 for the regular cards, the currently wild card (i.e. card with value 6 for round 6) is worth 20 points, and Jokers are worth 50. Some players (my family included) only count the temporarily wild card as its face value only. The game goes in a similar fashion until the Kings round is over. The person with the least amount of points at the end of all rounds is the winner.
One playthrough that I played with my family ended with me winning the game. For starters, I went out on the very first turn of the first round, much to the chagrin of everyone else. The somewhat bad thing about the first round (the round with 3 cards) is that you either go out or you don't and you have to add all of your cards. There is no in-between. And if you have two wild cards (which is something like a 4.3% chance of happening) you go out immediately no matter what third card you have. You also have to get rid of your Joker card (which can be used to the next person's advantage) if you can't do anything with it (since it’s worth 50 points). When I go out right out the bat like that, I usually ask the person in front of me if they want the card I have or not. Some players (like my mom) also wait a turn before declaring themselves out to give someone a fair chance. Hence round 3 is probably the harshest round.
Round 4 and 5 are about the same no matter what playthrough you are in. Sometimes you are lucky enough to get out early and make everyone get points but, more likely than not, it's more of a slog that requires more turns than round 3 (you have to get a set of size 4 or 5 in these rounds). Round 6 allows you to have two sets of 3 this time which is marginally easier than the previous two rounds. I believe my brother got upset over the fact that my dad went out during the second turn of that round and he had rotten luck with starting cards. My brother in this instance got what my grandparents call a Chinese straight where you have numerous sets of 2 matching cards but no third one to complete the set (and no Wild cards of course). You have to eat your points then.
I suppose that leads to my one minor complaint about this game: it is more luck based than strategy based. You have to bend to the whim of the cards and you can't really create luck from thin air. And even if you follow a certain strategy that normally helps you, sometimes it can backfire horribly. For example, a strategy that I normally employ (and did employ in the mid-game of this particular game) is to hold onto the Queens and Kings that are dropped by the other players. Because the Queens and Kings are the highest valued cards (barring Wild cards) most players get rid of them unless they have a good number of those cards to begin with or they're Wild. I subvert this strategy by instead "collecting their garbage". Sometimes it works like a charm (like it did in a couple of rounds in this game) but sometimes it will increase your score by 20 to 30.
As you progress through a game you have more options with how you can arrange your cards, which allows for more flexibility and a tiny bit more strategy. On round 10, my mom miraculously had a straight consisting of six cards (with no Wilds) and a single 3 card (with 3 Wilds to finish the set). Holding onto a three card especially when things are looking tight or the round has been going on for a while is a particularly useful strategy. Except for going out with zero points, three points is the lowest amount of points you can get in a round. Because of this, it is probably the most common score to get in the game and feels about as good as going out. Unfortunately, my mother had consistently terrible luck for the rest of this game and firmly cemented herself in last place after the Jacks round.
I am not sure why this is the case but it seems as if players go out relatively quickly in the later rounds in the game despite having more cards into play. For example, in this playthrough, I went out after two turns in the Jacks round, and immediately in the Queens round. It could be because of the heightened flexibility of how you can use your cards later in the game (contrasting to how you're forced to have 3, 4, or 5 cards in the set in the beginning). It could also be because you are much more likely to have more wild cards in your deck with which you can create sets with relative ease.
During the last round, I was going strong in this game and was ahead of second place by 40 points. That all could change, however, because since there are more cards in play, you have a higher chance to get a disgustingly large score. That even happened to me in another unrelated playthrough where I was in the lead but was forced to eat 54 points during the Kings round because someone else was lucky enough to go out turn 1. Obviously, I was devastated. But in this game, I had only fifteen points worth of unmatched cards in the first turn, so I was guaranteed to win no matter what. My mom went out but it was a little too much too late. Although there is such a thing as redemption in the late game, my mom couldn’t benefit at all from her win. Mom was behind everyone by nearly a hundred points when I won the game by 32 points.
The scores tend to fluctuate more depending on how many players are actually in the game. As an example, I had like 79 points whereas most were in the mid-hundreds, and mom was at 250-ish. The game recommends only having a maximum of 8 players but we have managed to have 9 at one point. You can theoretically play the game with 2 people but I feel as if the game becomes incredibly boring at that point and the scores tend to be more equal and similar when you have less people. I will be describing in less detail a game where it was only me and my mother playing.
I find that the rounds take even longer when you have more people even though this is probably not exactly the case. It's probably because it feels much more repetitive and less competitive when there are only two people playing. It felt like a shorter version of War at that point (where one person simply draws the top card of their deck and wins the round if theirs is larger). War, in my opinion, is the most boring card game in existence and should only be played by people who don't have the cognitive abilities to play better, more complex card games (six-year-olds as an example).
In contrast to the first playthrough, it took about seven rounds for one of us to go out with three cards. This isn't exactly the norm by any means, but it does show how drawn-out games with less people can be. Rounds continued to have more turns and this allowed someone to craft a better deck to get out with. It seemed as if each round the loser would only be stuck with points values that were under ten (quite underwhelming). Only during a couple of rounds did anything exciting happen and someone went out immediately. And even during those rounds, only one round gave me more than 10 points (23 to be exact).
And even though the rounds felt like they were longer and the game more monotonous, this game in reality lasted much shorter than "normal" games. It took us about 38 minutes to complete the game, when on average it takes almost an hour to do so (sometimes more if there are more players involved). Surprisingly, out of all the games that I have played, nobody has ever gotten to the bottom of the deck. Even when we had a group of nine people playing that didn't happen. I suppose that's an aspect of good game design (you don't break the game by causing everyone to forfeit and eat whatever points they had).
Even though I have been listing off a litany of what can be perceived as cons, there are good aspects of this game. Because it doesn't require complex, "serious" strategy like chess, players can just relax and have fun with it. And even though my brother and father can get enraged when rounds don't go their way, at least the player can know it was mostly luck that led to a loss and not their terrible strategy. It can be played by nearly all ages (the game box recommends the age of 8 at a minimum) and it's simple enough that even my somewhat autistic brother can play it. This game leads to good conversations generally and can lead to laughter when someone does egregiously poorly or does exceptionally well. It's a family game, through and through.
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DarkMagicianBob's Five Crowns (Other)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Saturday 6 February, 2016
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