Roux Dat: LUZ, Flip 7: With A Vengeance and Circus Flohcati

I spent a glorious four days in beautiful Brevard / Asheville, North Carolina last week. I used to camp with a core set of guys in our scout troop, and I discovered that most of them also liked board games. So, after our own sons made Eagle and we moved on from the troop, we kept up occasional board game nights. But since, we also like spending time in the outdoors together, we decided every year or so to plan our own little weekend away to play games, drink Abita root beer, hike and bike, and explore the town. 

This year, we headed to western North Carolina, home of the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains. Brevard is such a cool little town — it’s got great restaurants and coffee shops, an amazing music scene (we spent a memorable evening checking out Seth Walker and Oliver Wood — both fantastic!), and proximity to dozens of waterfalls. 

But, of course, I had to bring some games for those afternoon breaks when we needed to cool our hiking boots down. This particular group likes games in the weight and heft of Azul and Camel Up, so I always enjoy trying to find games that will fit right in their wheelhouse.

First up, we went over to the Oskar Blues Taproom on the outskirts of Brevard, which not only had some great local brews, but plenty of table space to play games. I did a quick teach of LUZ, a new trick-taking game from Iello Games and designer Taiki Shizawa. If you have played Chris Wray’s Xylotar or Antoine Bauza’s Hanabiyou are already about halfway there. 

In LUZ, players try to score points by winning the exact amount of tricks that they bid at the start of each of four rounds. But, just like in Xylotar and Hanabi, players cannot see their cards! The only info we get is what we can see from the other players cards, because our cards are faced away from us. If you are not too confident about your deductive skills, you can “safely” bid, which means you get half the points of winning your bet, but you can go plus or minus one trick. 

That first round was rough for my buddies. They had played Xylotar before, but that was two years ago in Bentonville. Any muscle memory from that game was long gone, but by the end of the first round, they were starting to pick up on the strategy. By the third and fourth round, it was a dog fight for each bet and trick, and I would love to play this with my trick-take loving buddies Logan, Sagan, Dugas, and Carlos. 

We also had time between sips to get in a game of Flip 7: With A Vengeance, the standalone expansion to Flip 7 (a/k/a The Greatest Card Game Of All Time — it says it right on the box). My buddies were very familiar with Flip 7, so this was an easy teach. In fact, I didn’t even go over the new cards, just let them happen naturally as they came across them. I told them the first game of Flip 7 is always a “pancake” game (as the Name Father likes to call it), and by that I mean that it doesn’t really count, just like the first pancake you make in the batch that you flip to Fido. 

Most of the new cards are negative point cards that a player can “give” to any other player. They do things like subtract points from the hand’s score, or even make the player lose half of their points. What is interesting about these cards are that the new rules in Vengeance state that players remain “active players” (meaning cards can be played on them) even after “staying” (but not after “busting”), which means if the leader plays it safe, he is going to get dumped a lot of negative cards. By the time the other players bust, the leader just might have negative points that hand (although we played with the rule that you cannot get ‘less than zero’ at the end of a round. Your mileage may vary.) But there are other interesting cards, too, things like forcing a player to flip four instead of three or flip just one more and then stay. I really dig the cards that have special numbers, like the 13 (yes there are now thirteen 13s in the deck) that protects itself or the Zero which scores you NO points unless you get seven cards in your tableau. 

We really dug Flip 7: With A Vengeance. I get that it is polarizing — the cards are pretty negative, and there’s lots of player interaction. But, this is such a quick playing game and the object is not really winning, it’s trying to get those stand up, tense moments. The bar game was basically a learning game, but we played it again the next afternoon, and that’s where the knives came out. It came down to the last turn, with all of us hanging around within a play or so of winning. 

And finally, we played Circus Flohcati, which is probably one of my absolute favorite card game reprinted by 25th Century Games. This is a Dr. Reiner Knizia designed card game about running a flea circus, but the theme really doesn’t matter. Honestly, it was a good game to play right next to Flip 7, because it has a similar mechanic of flipping a card from the top of the deck. The difference here is that instead of worrying about having the same numbers — and busting as a result in Flip 7 — players don’t want to flip cards that are the same color as the others in the market. 

The object is simple — score more points than the other players, or go for an epic win by holding in your hand all ten different colors / suits. Players do this by flipping a card from the deck into the market. If they don’t like the card, they do not have to draft it. Instead, they can flip another card, as long as that card isn’t the same exact color as any other card in the market. If they do match colors, they bust, and their turn ends. But hopefully, they draft a card in their hand, and at the end of the game, will score for the HIGHEST card in each color plus any triples that they have collected and played. 

Circus Flohcati is my favorite kind of card game. It’s simple to teach, with really just one binary decision point (hit or stay), and some clever strategy decisions between grabbing cards that could make a triple, or holding out for 6s / 7s, or even trying to collect as many different colors. I need to break this card game out more. For some reason, we really only play it at Christmas time, but it is an AnyTime type of game in my house. 

It was another great trip with the Scout Dads, with some great gaming, fantastic food (highlights were Bohemians in Brevard and Mac Daddy’s in Asheville, and some awesome music. We even stopped at this cool general store which sold a ton of candies and cookies I had never seen before. (Not pictured — caramel and blueberry MoonPies!?)

Can’t wait until the next trip. 

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo

** Complimentary copies of the game were provided by the publisher. **