No Thanks! Review – Earning the Right to Reject Door-to-Door Salespeople

Disclaimer: No Thanks was provided for free by CMYK Games, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

No Thanks!, by Thorsten Gimmler, is one of those games that never seems to go away. I remember people recommending it almost a decade ago, and it’s still one of the first games that comes up whenever someone asks for a asks for a quick card game that’s far cleverer than it looks.

Now it’s received the CMYK treatment, with the publisher welcoming it into the Magenta Collection. But does this modern makeover still hold up, or has time finally caught up with this classic?

How to play

No Thanks! is a reverse auction game where you’re paying for the privilege of not taking cards. That’s important because every card you collect is worth points, and at the end of the game, whoever has the lowest score wins.

At the start of the game, everyone receives a fistful of cheery tokens, each sporting a different expressive face. A card is then revealed in the centre of the table. Each card is numbered, representing the number of points it’s worth, and on your turn you have two choices:

• Place one of your tokens on the card and politely decline with a “No thanks!”
• Take the card along with any tokens that have already been placed on it.

The catch is that if you ever run out of tokens, you lose the ability to say no and must take the next card that comes your way.

There’s one more thing to keep in mind. If you collect consecutive cards, such as 4, 5 and 6, you only score the lowest card in that sequence. In this case, only the 4 is worth points, while the 5 and 6 are effectively free.

Play continues until the deck runs out. Everyone then adds up the value of their cards and subtracts one point for each token they have remaining. The player with the lowest score wins and earns the right to tell the next door-to-door salesperson, “No thanks!”

More than just saying no

No Thanks! has been around for a couple of decades now, and for good reason. It’s a fun, easy-to-learn game that still has a bit of bite to it. The reverse auction system also helps it stand out. It’s not something you see very often. In fact, the only other game I’ve played that uses a similar idea is Smile, and while I enjoyed that one, No Thanks! is far superior.

Probably the biggest thing to be aware of going into this classic is that it can be a little bit mean. In one of our games, my neighbour was down to their final token and, knowing exactly the damage I’d cause, I happily picked up a card with about ten tokens sitting on it. Not only was it a card I wanted, but it also left them with little choice except to accept whatever cards came next.

They were not amused.

The other cheeky play you can do is breaking up someone’s run of consecutive cards. If they’ve collected an 8, 9, 10 and 12, you can grab the 11 for yourself and stop them from scoring the whole sequence as a single card.

Beyond that, you’re simply trying to squeeze as many tokens as possible onto the cards you eventually take, while avoiding the high-value cards and building runs that make your collection less painful to score. Every turn becomes a little game of chicken. You’re either waiting one more round with your fingers crossed, hoping nobody takes the card, or desperately wishing someone else would before you’re forced to. What surprised me most, though, was how many different paths there were to victory.

One player happily watched the highest-value card in the deck circulate until they ran out of tokens and had to take it. By then, it had accumulated so many tokens that they were able to avoid taking another card for the rest of the game, and they ended up winning. In other games, the winner focused on building satisfying runs that dragged their scores back into the single digits. Most victories, though, came from a healthy mix of both approaches.

That was probably the biggest surprise. Despite the rules being so straightforward, there are plenty of viable strategies. Better still, the reverse auction never lost its appeal. Deciding whether a card has finally accumulated enough tokens to be worth taking remained entertaining right through to the final round.

While I don’t think No Thanks! generates quite as much excitement as some of the other games in the Magenta Collection, it’s easy to see why it’s become such an enduring classic. It’s a game you can comfortably pull out with almost any group, as long as they don’t mind a bit of rough and tumble.