Omens

• Designer: Maxime Rambourg
• Publisher: Spiral Editions
• Players: 4-6
• Age: 14+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You’ve found a mysterious box filled with strange cards. As you try to decipher their meaning, you soon realize that you won’t be able to do it without help. Surrounded by your friends, you begin to unravel their secret: played the right way, the cards eventually disappear. But they always come back, safely tucked away in the box, for the next game. In Omens, you team up to get rid of your cards until you have only one left in your hand. Each of your cards interacts with the cards played by your partner, as well as those of your opponents, so you need to play them at the right moment! The team that sheds its cards first wins.

To start, remove the Absolute cards from the deck (ranks 30-35), shuffle them and deal one face up to each player.  These will determine the teammates for the game (highest with lowest, next highest with next lowest, etc).  In a 5p game, the middle three are a team of three.  Each player then gets a player aid card with their team designation on it so that everyone knows who is teamed up with whom.  These Absolute cards are the first cards in the player hands.  Depending on player count, each player is then dealt 3 or 4 cards from the deck to finish off their hand.  Play will begin with the player who was dealt the highest valued Absolute card.

The starting player plays any card from their hand face up in front of them.  If there is an instant (lightning bolt) effect on their card, it is immediately resolved.  Then going clockwise, the next player does the same.  Do this until all players have a card in front of them.  Now, simultaneously resolve all of the end-of-turn (hourglass) effects.

The player with the highest valued Arcane card in front of them will win the trick, unless there is a card in play that provides a different rule.  The winner gets to discard their card.  Some end-of-turn effects will cause cards to be discarded.  All other cards are returned to their owner’s hand.

A team wins the round if one of its players has only 1 card left in their hand after a trick.  All players on that team turn their player aid card over to the laurel side to show they have won a round. If multiple players have 1 card left, the player with the highest valued card left in their hand wins the round.  Shuffle all of the cards and deal them back out.

When a team wins a second round, they have won the game.

My thoughts on the game

Omens is a game that I was interested in from the start because I love card games with differing actions on each card.  The concept here was intriguing – play a modified trick taking game, but with lots of card actions and partner interactions thrown in the mix.  There is definitely a lot going on in each hand of Omens, and as many/most cards are put back into the player’s hands, you’ll learn a lot about their hand makeup as it progresses.  

This should change your strategy as you try to overcome the powers of the cards in the hand.  Obviously, you’d like to win tricks whenever you can as this is the one way to guarantee that you can discard your card.  The Absolute cards are really good for this, as they are the highest numbered cards in the deck; however their power of triggering a card trade is also super useful.  You can use it to try to give a less useful card to your opponents OR, more likely, you can use it to trade cards with your partner to gain information and wordlessly communicate strategy.  If nothing else, each of you now knows a card in your partner’s hand, and this can help you use your cards as best you can. Almost all of the cards have a power that can be useful in the right situation.  Trying to figure out which cards are in play and how to best use those cards is the key.  

That being said, while I keep talking about strategy, a lot of times it feels like you don’t have as much control as you think.  There are a lot of cards that can be used to block play – trading cards, ignoring the highest number, making the lowest card win, etc – that forces you to just go with the flow and change your plans on the fly.   Trying to take advantage of actions to let you discard cards when you don’t win is another key.

Overall, the game works great, but there is a touch more uncertainty in the card play than what I like. Not enough to keep me away from the game, but enough to make me not request it.   It might stick around with an unintentionally developed variant that two of my groups have fallen into – which is playing a single round as a game.  It comes in at 10-15 minutes, and that feels right for the game here.  People are happy to play a single hand rather than best two out of three.  

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. (1 hand): The concept was interesting but in practice it was mostly chaos, which I don’t generally enjoy. I was happy to play just a single hand. That was with six players – If I were to try it again I would want to do it with four. But I’m fine not trying it again.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale Y, John P, Dan B
• Not for me…