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Players: 2-4 (ages 8+)
Playing Time: 20 minutes
DaVinci is a cool guy. He came up with a bunch of great stuff. I’m a fan, I must admit. Recently, DaVinci has been gaining popularity—ever since the book, The DaVinci Code came out. It was bound to happen that companies would start jumping on the DaVinci bandwagon and start churning out products based on him and his work. I saw DaVinci’s Challenge Card Game, and I thought it looked very interesting. But when I played it, I found that it wasn’t really interesting at all.
The game tries to capitalize on the DaVinci craze. It’s as if they took part of his work (DaVinci’s symbols) and didn’t really know how to throw them into a card game. DaVinci’s Challenge plays much like UNO, where you play your cards into a middle pile and try to get rid of all of the cards in your hand. At the start, all the cards are dealt out to all the players. The cards consist of numbers (5, 10, 25, 50, 75 or 100) and a DaVinci symbol. The person going first must put down a card (any card) and the next player can put down the same denomination or higher or put down a pair of cards, higher than the card placed. If you place an exact duplicate or matching pairs, you get to skip the next person. It’s beneficial to put down as many pairs as possible, as it gets rid of more cards in your hand faster—and it’s harder for the next player to place down a matching set. The play goes around the table until no more cards can be placed. Then the table is cleared and play starts fresh with a new start card. The first person to lay his or her last card wins.
Unfortunately, the game has no real replay value. It gets boring very fast, and—though you’d expect a game that uses the name of such a great thinker to require strategic thinking—there’s no real strategy or thought put into the game play. Don’t be fooled—DaVinci would not have endorsed this product. UNO is a much better game.
