One afternoon, many years ago, our good friends Jody and Nathan asked us to stop by Nate’s apartment on our way home from our camp. They had something for us. A little white box, with a pile of strange cards and one simple rule: Draw a Card, Play a Card.
We were immediately drawn to the chaotic game of Fluxx! We’ve been playing it as a light game, a party game, a filler game and a family game ever since. This winter, Robin and Jared gave us a copy of Zombie Fluxx to add to our collection (which also includes Eco Fluxx and Family Fluxx) and JediBoy wanted to play it - interested in the zombies, of course!
The game by Looney Labs is simple enough that at 5 1/2, JediBoy picked up on it easily. It does require reading, since the course of the game is controlled by the text on the cards. The reading on Family Fluxx is simpler than the original, and the rules for Zombie Fluxx are a tiny bit more complex than regular Fluxx.
Fluxx has 4 types of cards: yellow Rules, blue Actions, green Keepers and pink Goals. At the beginning of the game, you have three cards in your hand and on your turn you follow the basic Rule: draw a card, then play a card. But the card you play might be “Play 2 cards” in which case you’d immediately play a second card before ending your turn. And if the second card was “Draw 3 cards,” you would draw the extra two cards to bring yourself up to 3 cards for the turn.
All the cards have clear explanations right on them. (Click on the image above to see it bigger.) Yellow Rules cards change the rules - how many cards you draw, how many you play; how many you can keep in your hand or on the table in front of you, and so on. Blue Action cards let you take an action - steal a card from another player, trade hands, take an extra turn, scramble the Keepers, and so on. Green Keepers are objects - Cookies, Milk, The Sun, The Moon, Rocket, Love, Taxes, Death, Television… and so on. You keep these on the table in front of you. Pink Goal cards give you the conditions for winning - but there can only be one Goal on the table at a time, so playing a new Goal removes the old one. Most Goals are pairs of Keepers - Milk and Cookies, for example, or Death and Taxes. Some are exclusive Goals, like All You Need Is Love. Others are a little different, like Ten Cards in Hand, but all Goals also have explanatory text. The instant the cards you have match the Goal, you win! Sometimes the game takes two minutes, sometimes you can go on for half an hour.
Just when you think you’re going to win, someone changes the Goal. And just when you think you’ve got “Draw 3, Play 2″ down pat, you’re suddenly confronted with “Draw 3, Play 2, Final Card Random” which lets the player next to you randomly draw the card from your hand for you to play as your last card of the turn. Then, someone (usually me) throws down “Rules Reset” with a laugh, and you’re back to “Draw a Card, Play a Card.” This game is light, and funny, and a refreshing change to randomness when you’ve been playing heavy games like Colosseum and Settlers. It’s also great for adults to play with kids, because you just cannot form any strategic edge in this game. Grown-ups have no advantage. It’s all about choosing the cards that are the most fun each round, and the usual response to “I won!” is… “Let’s play again!”
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