Hue, hue, electric blue as David Bowie could have once sung – we don’t know for sure that he didn’t. Anyway, quick card-laying, point scoring fun awaits us!
Introduction
My latest Pack O Games review and this one is certainly colourful (as its name suggests) and is one of the quickest games in this series I’ve played. It’s also a rare one that will go up to five players so that’s also noteworthy. Let’s see what else Hue has going on.
Setup
As you might expect if you’ve read any other Pack O Games reviews of mine, we’ve got a small box with 30 chewing gum-sized cards in it. Inside Hue we have five starting cards, five poison cards (!!) and 20 regular cards.
To begin randomly select three of the five starting cards and lay them out so that they’re slightly offset. Each card is divided into three sections so this is easy enough to do. Randomly deal each player a poison card and put any unused starting/poison cards back in the box as we’ve got what we need now.
Deal each player a hand of cards (five in a 2-4 player game, four in a 5-player game) and again, put any unused cards away. We’re ready to go!
Hue do you play?
Not my best pun but don’t dwell on it…
Each card in your hand is divided into three square sections. Cards can either be “solid” so will have a single colour in each of the sections, or “striped” where each section will actually have three slivers of colour (making nine in total across the card).
On your turn all you do is play a card so that one side of one square section is adjacent to another section already in play. You can overlap a single section already in play but matching colours on adjacent edges is NOT mandatory (and we’ll see why that could helpful below), but ultimately you’re trying to create blocks of contiguous colours for scoring purposes.
When playing a solid card adjacent to a striped card, it’s absolutely fine as long as one of the three stripes matches the colour of the solid card.
You’ll keep playing until everyone has a single card left which will act as their scoring card, meaning that each player will only ever score for three of the five colours.
What’s your poison
Poison cards are devious little things that can be played to reduce the value of a contiguous group to zero, which can go a long way to sabotaging your opponents and giving you a bump on the points front. Of course people may choose to do this to you which is just bad sportsmanship and utterly unwarranted…
Poison cards can also be kept as scoring cards, and having that as your final card in hand doesn’t carry any penalty at all so you shouldn’t feel obliged to play it.
Hue’s counting?
Well… we all are, but we’re counting scores for different things… Each colour is assigned a score based on it’s largest contiguous value – solid cards count for three points and a stripe counts for one. Remember poison cards will reduce an area to zero so you may end up scoring the second biggest area instead.
The colours you score depend on the card you kept in hand, and the colour in the middle of your card will score double points. If that’s a solid card it’s easy enough to figure out. If you kept a striped card back, you score the colours of the three stripes in the centre square, with the middle one of those being worth double. Most points wins and ties are broken with the start player and then nearest to them clockwise (as playing last has a potential small advantage)
Final thoughts
It’s a clever little thing is this. It has a similar sort of vibe to it as IRK where you’re following a similar approach of playing cards a score card back and trying to (secretly) maximise your points. This feels a little more simplified than IRK as blocks of colour are a little easier to keep track of.
The poison cards are a clever mechanic. You know everyone has one, you know it’s a potential threat at any time (especially in a 5-player game where all the colours are in play) but it might be more beneficial to keep it to score.
It’s a quick one to get through as you’re only playing 4/5 cards (depending on player count) so it’s a rapid race to maximise your score. It has 10 minutes as a guide on the box and I think that’s pretty spot on.
It’s a good café game as it’s not taking up a huge amount of space, even with five players so there’s a lot going for it. It’s also rated 8+ for age and I’d say this is a good one for that age group. You could even house-rule excluding the poison cards to make the introduction to this sort of game a little kinder.
