Tearable Quest
- Designer: Shintaro Ono
- Publisher: Allplay
- Players: 1+
- Age: 8+
- Time: 10 minutes
- Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4s22H4A
- Played with review copy provided by publisher
In Tearable Quest, you’ll have to equip yourself with powerful weapons, fend off terrible boss monsters, and loot gleaming treasure chests using the powerful ability of: tearing paper! Each player gets a sheet. Each round, a goal card is revealed for all players. For example, the goal might show two swords and a cyclops. A boss card is also revealed, and this card is constant for the whole game.
Start a 2-minute timer and start questing! To complete a quest, tear off the exact icons shown on the card (and no extras). Make sure that the icons are fully showing on your torn-off pieces—partials don’t count! You can tear off multiple instances of the active quest to score even more. There are bonuses and curses on the back of your paper—make sure you check the back or hold your paper up to the light! The player with the most points after three rounds wins.
I have been enamored with this game ever since playing the original Japanese version a few years ago. The game is simply ridiculous fun as you tear little bits off your sheet trying to get the right icons (and ONLY the right icons) onto your bits. It’s actually a bit harder than it looks because if you have even a little tear into an icon, that disqualifies that piece.
You can also try to hold the sheet up to the light to look at the icons on the back – trying to get bonus points for treasure chests or trying to avoid curse icons and the VP penalty that comes with it.
Since you only get to keep one piece of paper from round to round, and you must use that single starting sheet for all 3 rounds in the game – there is a bit of paper management that you have to deal with as well. You can’t be overly aggressive with your tears in the early rounds unless you’re OK with leaving yourself with a very small starting area in the later rounds.
It is a raucous game filled with laughing, sweaty hands (at least for me), and a fun feeling of accomplishment at the end of the game when you sheet is torn all to bits!
Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers
- I love it! Dale Y
- I like it.
- Neutral.
- Not for me…
Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4s22H4A
Soda Jerk
- Designer: Chris Yi
- Publisher: Allplay
- Players: 2-4
- Age: 6+
- Time: 15 mins
- Played with review copy provided by publisher
In Soda Jerk, you’ll be dealt a hand of delicious soda ingredient cards, including strawberry, blueberry, banana, kiwi, and orange. On your turn, either:
- Play a card face down in front of one of the taps (which are also labeled strawberry, blueberry, banana, kiwi, and orange)
- Flip over a face down card
Play continues until a player starts their turn with three cards left in hand, all players flip over cards consecutively, or all cards on the table are face-up. At this point, determine the final value of all taps: reveal any remaining face-down cards and add up all matching flavor cards while subtracting all non-matching cards. A tap can be worth negative points!
Finally, tally up your score. Each card left in your hand is worth points equal to the final value at the matching tap. So, if you ended with two strawberry cards and the tap value of strawberry was 8, you get 16 points. Try to get the most points while making your opponents go negative!
The game is all about bluffing and reading your opponents. You have to try to guess/divine/predict which fruits will be positive at the end of the game and then hold on to as many of them as possible. There may be a bit of groupthink going on, but in our group, most fruits end up in negativeland, so players are trying to shed as many cards as they can from their hand to avoid taking multiple negative penalties.
The catch here with hand management is that you’d like to keep as many cards of a suit that you think will be positive, but if you don’t play some of those cards to the board, it’s unlikely that the suit will end up positive…
There are certainly times where it makes sense to reveal a card – to figure out whether something is worth keeping – or trying to figure out whether another player is in favor or against a particular fruit, or just to temporize and spend a turn where you don’t have to play a card down. But it certainly feels like in most of my games there is at least one player who is just chucking cards down every turn meaning that the game is heading to a rapid conclusion.
Again, I don’t know if this is group think or not, but it does keep the pressure on you to figure out as quickly as possible which suits you want to keep.
There is a more advanced version where each of the fruits has a special ability that triggers when you play a card there, but we’ve found that it just makes the game be more complicated than it wants to be. (For me, this just wants to be a ten minute easy-going, not-too-much-thinking filler).
Vivo
- Designer: LEO
- Publisher: Allplay
- Players: 3-4
- Age: 10+
- Time: 30 minutes
- Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3OqaP0i
- Played with review copy provided by publisher
In Vivo, each round starts by revealing a harmony type (Solo, Duet, Trio, Quartet). The harmony determines how many suits must be played in the trick—not being able to is considered playing “off-harmony,” making that player ineligible for points. (Essentially, your card doesn’t count in the trick).
At the end of the trick, the player who played the highest on-harmony card scores two points, and the lowest on-harmony card scores for the value of that card (those bass notes are so important!). The suits of the cards played don’t matter as long as they are in a valid suit. If there is a tie, the later played card breaks the tie (whether for high or low). The player who played the lowest on-harmony card gets to lead the next trick.
Play through all 12 of the harmony cards (i.e. 12 tricks) in the round, and play two rounds to finish the game. The player with the most points at that time wins.
There is an interesting bit of hand management that happens in Vivo as both high and low cards can be “winners”, and with careful planning, a middle card can be a huge score in the endgame. As the round evolves, it definitely helps to try to keep as many suits in your hand as possible so that you can be eligible to play in as many later tricks as possible.
There is definitely still a bit of luck as you need to have a favorable harmony card flip up (and you need to be in a good spot in turn order) to get a big payout. So, it helps to count the high cards in each suit, count the low cards in each suit, and also keep count of the harmony cards. But with the right setup, you might be able to sneak in a low card of 7 or 8 near the end, and that can be a gamebreaking play.
The game definitely gives players a lot of latitude with how to play cards, and skillful management of the cards left in your hand is the key here. Vivo is a neat trick taking game that is unique enough to keep a place here in the gaming basement.
Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers
- I love it!
- I like it. Dale Y
- Neutral.
- Not for me…
Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3OqaP0i
