Recycle is a hand management game.
Title: Recycle (or R-Eko)
Year Published: 2003
Designer: Susumu Kawasaki
Publisher: 999 Games
Players: 2-5
Game Time: ~20 Mins
Set-up Time: >1 Mins
Ages: 8+
Theme: Recycling
Mechanic: Hand Management
How to win: Score the most points.
Game Description
A local city has a problem of un-separated trash left by citizens. Each player is a company that does the trash separation and recycling. By carrying trash to corresponding storage places, a player gets points. However if you carry too much, you must throw trash away illegally! Well, after all, your aim is to get money…
Set-Up
The setup is simple and requires a bit of shuffling around depending on the player count.
Place factory cards in stacks in order on the table. The number of cards differs from 2 to 5 players but the cards will be in this order from top to bottom: 0, 1, 2, 3, 3, -2, 4, 5.
Shuffle the recycling cards, put one at the bottom of each factory on the waste side then deal with everyone’s 3 cards.
Game Play
The gameplay is also simple.
You play one or more of a single type of recycling card above the relevant recycling factory on the recycling side.
Then take all cards in that factory’s waste pile into your hand.
If the value of the factory side cards is 3 or less, put that many cards into that factory’s waste pile.
If the value of factory side cards is 4 or more, take the top factory reward card and put it in front of you face up. Then take the waste pile into your hand as normal and just add one card from the deck into the waste pile.
At the end of your turn, Discard down to 5, discarded cards are placed face down in front of you.
Game End
When all reward cards of one facility have been taken, the game ends at the end of that turn.
Players remove all cards in their hands from the game. If you only have one reward token of a colour, discard it.
If you don’t have any face-down cards, gain 1 point for each player that does (you get 4 points per player in a 2 player game)
Add all points of your reward tokens then get -1 point for each face-down card that you discarded during the game.
Recycle Round-Up
This is another one of those games that people just enjoy, no matter their preference/experience level.
The simple Play/Take/Refill turns make it a very quick and easy game, but it is by no means easy to play well.
You need to try not to discard cards, at all. If you gather in more than you play you discard and lose points to your opponents.
Also, you need to score multiple cards of the same colour if possible. Scoring one card of a colour counts for nothing so it’s giving you something to think about there too.
Then there are the -2 point cards… Do you want it? If you can get it and you don’t get any other of that colour it’s fine, but you want to leave it for your opponents if possible.
Recycle Rating
Easy gameplay but plenty of strategies and planning to think about and easy access with wide appeal.
I give it 8/10