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Players: 2-4 (ages 6+)
Playing Time: Longer than the attention span of an 8-year-old boy
My eight-year-old nephew loves to play games. Whenever we see him, we play games. When he comes over, he immediately heads for the game closet. And when it comes to buying presents, we know he’ll be ecstatic if we buy him games (or books on Mount Everest, but that’s a story for another day). This Christmas, someone bought him Sorry! Card Revenge, and he couldn’t wait to get us to try it out with him.
To begin, each player chooses a color and gets a small board and four pawns in that color. Players are then dealt five cards from the deck. Cards can be numbered cards in each of the four different colors, or they can be special cards that have special instructions (like a wild card, which can be played at any time). Players take turns playing cards on the discard pile, matching colors or creating numeric sequences to get rid of as many cards as possible. If you can’t play a card from your hand, however, you have to push The Big Red Button—which is on top of the Big Red Pawn that’s set up in the middle of the playing area. The Big Red Pawn provides a bit of commentary and plenty of attitude throughout the game—and it tends to wreak havoc when you have to press the button on top of it. From time to time, it’ll be kind—and it’ll allow you to play any card in your hand. But, more often, it’ll force you to draw cards—sometimes as many as nine. And that’s not good, since your goal is to get rid of all the cards in your hand. Once you do, you get to place one of your four pawns on one of the Home spots on your game board. The first player to get all four pawns on the board wins.
Sorry! Card Revenge isn’t a difficult game to learn. As long as players know their colors and numbers, they’ll be just fine. In fact, after my nephew lost interest, his five-year-old little sister took over for him, and she was able to play on her own. The problem, however, was that my nephew (and, shortly thereafter, my niece) lost interest. Though pressing The Big Red Button (or, more accurately, making someone else press The Big Red Button) is lots of fun—and the Pawn’s commentary is always amusing—the game goes on for a very long time. While it doesn’t seem like too big a task to get rid of five cards, it often takes quite a while—because if you can’t play a card from your hand, the Big Red Pawn will usually make you draw a few more. The kids loved playing it—and the grown-ups had fun, too—but if you pick up a copy of Sorry! Card Revenge and decide to play with the kids, you might want to modify the rules a bit so they won’t lose interest.
