Innovation Card Game First Impressions
Innovation includes random randomness with a lot of stacks of cards.
Fluxx for grown-ups.
This game by Carl Chudyk is a journey through innovations from the stone age through modern times. Each player builds a civilization based on various technologies, ideas, and cultural advancements, all represented by cards. Each of these cards has a unique power which will allow further advancement, point scoring, or even attacking other civilizations. Be careful though, as other civilizations may be able to benefit from your ideas as well!
We played this with the expansion which added complexity in the fact I kept forgetting which stack to draw from 🙂 I’ll give the basics of gameplay only as there are so many abilities you can’t really go into detail.
Anyway… Here are some cards…
So you start with a few of Age One cards and have 2 actions.
Actions
You can draw a card but you draw a card equal to the level of your highest active card. To know about active cards you have to know you can play a card as an action…
These go into piles of their colour with the top card being ‘Active’. The cards have different symbols which are VERY important…
You can activate a card which gives an effect and usually depends on how many of the symbols you have. Many of them let players with the same amount or more of that symbol so the action too while others have a negative effect against those that have less than you.
As I mentioned these effects do loads of different things from manipulating cards to screwing over your opponents 😀
Indirectly of course 😉
Cards stack on top of each other but they can be ‘Splayed’ as the Purple cards are in the picture above. This keeps the top card still the active card but you get the benefit of the symbols on cards underneath. The direction you splay is directed by the ability played so it’s not so easy to plan, but possible.
The last action you can take is to Dominate by using Influence points you have earned to take a scoring card… you need these to win the game.
Well, you usually do, I won with an alternate win condition even though I was last on points. A reverse of what happened in Glory to Rome when I played that. 🙂
Innovation Summary
This is a fun if not a random game. There is no way you can plan anything but each game will be different.
If that appeals to you, Innovation is for you. I really liked it.
Jesta ThaRogue
