Friday, March 22, 2019

Doomed to Sequence

As I’m looking at games the next stages for our son’s gaming interests, I found myself looking again at Sequence.

Sequence is a cross between Go Moku and a deck of cards. You are trying to make two lines of five tokens on a board where every space is marked by a specific card from the deck. Yup, play a card and place a token on that spot. Two-eyed jacks are wild and one-eyed jacks let you remove an opponent’s token.

I’m going to be honest. I’m pretty meh about Sequence. Luck can play a big role. I think one of my issues is that individual cards can have very different values. Compare Sequence to Just 4 Fun Colours, a very similar game. Any given card in Just 4 Fun Colours can cover six spaces on a six by six board. In Sequence, any given card can cover two spaces on a ten by ten board.

Even by the standard of luck in games, Sequence feels swingy. And I like Cosmic Wimpout so I’m no stranger to random chance! And if someone draws more jacks, they have a huge advantage.

Buuut.... it is really easy to teach. And the swingy luck might serve as a leveler when playing with a small child. The bug might be a feature in that case. And, as weird as it seems to me, the theme playing cards might work well for some folks.

In theory, I could easily make a copy. Heck, I could laminate the board and use dry erase markers instead of tokens. However, I know that to convince most people (like small children) to play, having a ‘real’ copy will be a big deal. Of course, that shouldn’t be hard to thrift.

And maybe Sequence can lead to Go Moku.

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