Open Season
- Designers: Amélie Assié and Romain Lisciandro
- Publisher: Sit Down!
- Players: 2-4
- Age: 10+
- Time: 15 min/player
- Played with review copy provided by publisher (via Flat River Games)
In Open Season, you play as a monster — a little cruel, but wishing to do things right — who has decided to take revenge on the groups of adventurers who come to disturb their peace. After getting rid of them, you still have to decorate your living room properly, so you try to assemble a nice collection of heads on the wall.
Each player gets their own board which represents their living room wall. The deck of cards is shuffled – comprised of 6 species, with 6 copies of 5 different attributes in each species.. Five cards are flipped up in a row to form the Inn. If you are playing the expert version, choose four of your seven bonus tiles and place one each on top of the four columns of your board.
The game takes place over 11 or 9 rounds, then players score. Players take turns clockwise, doing the following on their turn:
- Fill the market to five face up cards.
- Move cards from you Stock to your Accolades
- Choose 2 cards from the Inn – take them into your hand
- Place one of the cards from the market, and place it on a free space on their board. Different wall locations may have placement rules or effects. If you are unable to legally place a card, you must place one of your cards face-down on a space.
- Place the unchosen card face up onto your stock; found in the bottom right of your player board
- Trigger any bonus actions; these actions are associated with the slots on the top row of your player board, and you trigger one when you place a card in your reserve matching a person associated with one of the actions (moving a trophy token, adding cards to your stock from another player, the Inn or the deck).. If by activating a bonus action, a new card is placed in your Stock, it can trigger another bonus action.
7a. If playing with bonus tiles, you activate a bonus tile if the entire column under it is filled in with faceup cards and they all have the same attribute showing
7b. If you have one, you may place a single Trophy token on a card either the top or bottom row of your wall. If on the top row, it will trigger the associated bonus action. If on the bottom, it will be used in endgame scoring.
On your player board
- All slots in the top row must contain different peoples and/or face down cards.
- The two cards on either side of the “Different” symbol must be of different peoples and/or face down cards.
- All slots in the bottom row must contain different peoples and/or face down cards.
When player walls are full, the game ends, and players count their points. You will need to use the scoresheet to record points, and each of the categories has a matching space on the player board. The card found in your particular player board will determine the species used to score that line for you. You only score the cards in your Accolades stack.
The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the fewest cards in their Accolades stack
My thoughts on the game
Open Season is quite a simple game mechanically – choose two cards each round, then place one on your wall (where it will set up criteria for scoring or set up bonus actions) and then place the other one in your Accolades pile (only these cards will score). As there are 180 cards in the deck, you’ll never see all the cards (or heck, even half of the cards) – so you’ll never be sure of what card you will draw – it would be extremely unlikely for any one species to be exhausted in the course of a game.
You make the same decision each turn, but each one becomes more and more difficult to make. Early on, many players like to place cards in the top row of their board, hoping to get the chance to trigger extra actions. Of course, if this happens, you’ll fill your Accolades with cards that match those action spaces – and then you won’t be able to score them until you can get a matching card in a corresponding scoring space on the board. There is a high level of risk/reward (or even push your luck) as the game nears the end; you’ll have to hope that one of your two cards drawn in the final round(s) are what you need for the empty space left on your board!
The trophy tokens can also come in handy. During the game, you can place them in the top row to generate extra actions. When they are on cards in the bottom row, they each count as a scoring card matching the type You can earn trophy tokens by filling specific spaces on your board earlier in the game. Both of these actions can be crucial to success – depending on the state of the game – and if you play your cards right, you might be able to use a token for both benefits… (see what I did there?!)
There are two different sides of the board to try to give you different ways to play the game (the shield side is a shorter/simpler version than the horn side). Otherwise, the board itself is fixed – as far as the positions of the scoring criteria and the actions – so the variation in the games will come from your reactive play decisions based on the random order that cards come out on your turn. There are also advanced tokens which can be chosen for the top of each column – and they are triggered if the column is filled with identical suited cards. We have had enough mind bending with the standard rules and honestly haven’t wanted to move onto this extension quite yet.
I would recommend trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. One of the top row actions is to allow you to steal the top card of another player’s Stock, and if their stock is empty, you can choose a random card from their Accolades. Regular readers of the blog will know already how I feel about these targeted attacks (with no possible defense), and my feelings on this type of game element remain unchanged. At least the targeted player does get some compensation – choosing a card from the Inn or mystery meat from the deck. Other than this bit of targeted interaction, the game is mostly played on your own board. I suppose one could hate draft to deny the next player a card they particularly want, but there is no reason to do this unless you could use the card yourself.
The rules are short and we found them to be a bit too concise. There seemed to be a few areas where the game expects you to intuit the correct way to play the game from your previous gaming experience without directly stating the rule in writing. For instance, based on the board layout, one would expect that each of the spaces in the top row uses the action icon located just to the left of it. And while the example helps to explain it, this is something that should be found in the text itself.
There was a bit of confusion with the extra actions and scoring criteria for the board spaces; they are in the same location, and it might have been a bit easier to distinguish them if one category was somehow highlighted (either outlined or in a different color box) to make it clear which ones were scoring criteria and which ones were bonus actions.. The art on the cards, while beautiful, also doesn’t do you any favors for gameplay. In concept, it’s cool to have different faces on the cards for a particular species; but at same time, the different art sometimes makes it more difficult to tell which cards go together. Admittedly, you can’t have it both ways – because if the art was all the same, I’m sure that someone would complain about that too.
Additionally, the rules for the trophy tokens could have been a bit clearer in the rules. It’s not entirely evident that you have to earn the tokens at some point earlier in the game in order to play one at the end of your turn. The art on the boards and cards is nice and expressive, though you may need to squint a bit to see the light green attributes in the corners on the dark green background. Differentiating them by color or outline would have helped. Furthermore, it was difficult to keep track of the different artwork of a particular species. While the varied art was beautiful to look at, it did compromise game play.
Open Season is an interesting card-laying game that gives you tough decisions throughout the game. The scoring is a bit non-intuitive in your first play, but once you see how it works, you’ll be continually challenged through your later games – often times trying to make decisions with competing scoring metrics. There are a lot of things to consider, and hopefully it won’t trigger analysis paralysis, but that’s certainly on the table here with so many different scoring things to consider. You’ll have many times when you’ll want to put a particular card in multiple places on a turn, and you’ll have to make the hard decision as to where to put those cards. In the end, the game still moves along as there are only 11 turns in the game…
Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers
Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers
I love it!
I like it.
Neutral. Dale Y
Not for me… John P
