Combining spatial recall and luck with teamwork, The Secret Door is a cooperative rendition of the classic Memory matching game. In this version, players are detectives trying to determine which three Valuables are behind the Secret Door, using process of elimination… and they’re up against the clock!
Like Memory, there are two of each Valuable, ranging from a treasure map to a statue to a stack of cash. However, unlike Memory, three of these are chosen at random and hidden under the Secret Door, and the rest are shuffled in with the twelve Time Cards before being laid out face-down on the board.
Once it’s all set up, players take turns revealing two cards. Any Time Cards discovered are set face-up along the top of the board, while matching pairs of Valuables go to the Vault at the bottom. Mismatched Valuables are then returned to face-down before the next player’s turn. Try to remember what’s where!
If you have enough paired Valuables in the Vault that you think you know which ones are missing, you can (collectively) decide to make your deduction and check it against the cards under the Secret Door. You only get one guess, though, so use it wisely!
If the twelfth Time Card is revealed, the game ends immediately. Time’s up! You’ll have to take your chances now, regardless of how far from a definitive conclusion you are. How many of the hidden Valuables can you guess right anyways? We seem to have a 2/3 trend, whenever time isn’t on our side. (Or is on our side… of the board. The photographed game above somehow had Time Cards on all three spaces of the astronomy tower, which was a very disappointing couple turns.)
Surprisingly, I’m not talking about mine this time. Rather, I’m talking about one of the cool new things to come out of quarantine, which is the Bringing The Zoo To You program! Since March 2020, several zoos across the US have joined the BringingTheZooToYou hashtag on Facebook with videos and Facebook Live streams, providing a mix of entertaining updates – such as Minnesota Zoo’s wolves howling along to the local siren test – and educational presentations on various animals, ecosystems (Symbiosis On The Reef), and aspects of care and maintenance. Of the selection I’ve watched so far, my personal favorite is Brookfield Zoo’s chat about Leo Red Panda – they trained him to use a paintbrush!
So yeah, this post is effectively an advertisement for a whole archive of (p)awesome animals and fascinating facts. Go wild!
The name certainly invokes a sense of foreboding, doesn’t it? This game isn’t actually about dead bodies, but the suspense is well deserved, because Captain Carcass is a press-your-luck game! And like all luck games, there’s no knowing when yours will run out.
There are 10 suits in the deck. The lowest value cards of each are placed in Davy Jones’ Locker, while the rest are shuffled to form the Loot Deck. On your turn, you’ll draw these face-up into the Exploration Area, choosing each time whether to press your luck or Return to the Surface and empty the Exploration Area into your Hold. But wait! Each suit has its own Effect, and you have to resolve the card you’ve just drawn before you decide whether to keep going. Some of these are extremely helpful – for instance, the Anchor safeguards everything you drew before it, so even if you dive too deep, some of the loot is yours. Others, like the Giant Squid, are much more inconvenient… the Giant Squid forces you to place two more cards in the Exploration Area before you can choose to return to the surface.
A Diving Incident is triggered when you draw a suit you already have in the Exploration Area. Instead of relocating to your Hold, the whole lot goes to the Locker! (Listen, it’s a luck game. Sometimes, you were greedy and went for a seventh card. Sometimes, your first card was a Giant Squid, your second, Squid-mandated card was also a Giant Squid, and fortune is just not in your favor today.)
The game ends when the last card of the Loot Deck is revealed and that player concludes their turn. Scoring in this game is interesting: instead of adding all the points in your Hold, only the highest value card of each suit is counted. Add ’em up, and whoever has the most points wins!
Once you’ve got the hang of the core game, there are also some optional additions. There are Variant cards, which offer alternative rules surrounding gameplay or scoring – one such example is Over Troubled Waters, which triggers Incidents by matching value rather than suit. These help to keep the game fresh and new, even if you’ve played several times. The other optional set is Diver cards. Each player gets one, and with it, a special ability that changes the Effect of some suit. (Unless you’re playing the Saboteur, in which case your ability is bound to another person instead.) Some suits have multiple variations, such as The Romantic (1) and The Romantic (2) – the first draws Mermaids straight into their Hold instead of the Exploration area, and the second gets bonus points for having at least one Mermaid at the end of the game. If there’s any suit overlap between players when the Divers are dealt, the duplicates are simply discarded and replaced.
Food fight! Created by The Odd 1s Out, Cafe Chaos is a great card game for when you want the wild fun of flinging food at your friends without the chore of having to clean it up afterwards.
First things first: everyone picks a character. Each character comes with their own special character action that will join the three basic actions in making up your initial hand. Whoever ate last also gets the Starting Player marker. Each round, starting from the starting player and going clockwise, each combatant will declare their target by pointing a sauce bottle at them; anything you throw this round will be thrown at them unless actions indicate otherwise – for instance, the Mad Scientist’s special ability, Outsmart, makes all attacks against you instead aimed at your target (unless it’s splash damage, which is unavoidable… but we’ll get to that later).
Once your targets are selected, everyone chooses three actions from their hand and places them face down on their player mat, in order. The way Cafe Chaos works, there are effectively three mini-rounds to each full round of gameplay, and now is when you determine what you’ll be doing for each of them. These actions are not adjustable once you’re past this step, so choose wisely.
If it isn’t the first round of the game, you’ll then interrupt your regularly scheduled chaos for something even more unpredictable – an event card! Whatever the top card of the event deck is, the table must abide by its terms, whether that’s a one-time effect (e.g. School Nurse: the player with the most splat points heals two) or an ongoing effect for the rest of the round, such as Cruel & Unusual Punishment, which mandates that every time you successfully attack someone with Food, you must take one splat point yourself!
Hey, what are splat points? Damage, effectively. We’ll get to that in food fight phase: everyone reveals their first action card (only the first) at the same time, and beginning with the starting player, those actions are resolved. The actions everyone has are Grab, Throw, and Duck. Grab lets you take any one card from the Floor (face-up cards in the middle of the table), or two if they’re both Food. Either way, you immediately draw replacement cards to bring the Floor back up to 5.
There are four types of cards in the deck. The first is bonus actions – you can pick these up using Grab to be used in later rounds, and unlike throwable cards, actions always go back into your hand after being used. Throwable cards are the other three categories: Food (yellow), Toppings (pink), and Conditions (blue). As you might expect, these are what you use for the Throw action. There are several possible combos, but the gist of it is that Food gets thrown, Toppings can either be thrown as Food or used to modify it, and Conditions can be used to modify either of the others, but cannot be thrown on their own – after all, “Scalding” isn’t an object you can hold. The more cards used in your combo, the more splat points you cause your target. These are red tokens that are used to cover the letters of “Cafe Chaos!” at the top of your player mat. If you make an especially epic combo (either one card of each type or one Condition and two Toppings) not only do you do four splat points of damage, but you also heal two of your own!
And then there’s Duck, which is fairly self-explanatory – you’re avoiding thrown Food and its accompanying splatter. This only works on thrown Food, though, and only on attacks that have Food at all. For more thorough defenses, look to the character and bonus actions, like Outsmart, but beware that many cards do splash damage (blue splatter rather than red, though the tokens are the same) which cannot be ducked, caught, or otherwise avoided. It’s also worth noting that anyone attacking with Food does not have to decide what Food they’re attacking with until it’s their turn, at which point, since everyone revealed at once, they already know if their target is ducking. (If you have a card to throw, you still have to throw one, but you don’t have to waste your combo on someone it’ll miss. Thrown cards get discarded.)
As you might expect, the next step is to rinse and repeat with actions two and three, after which, you’ll check for victory. More accurately, check for crushing defeat – once someone has all ten letters of “Cafe Chaos!” covered in splat tokens (yes, they count the exclamation point), the game is over, and whoever has the least splat damage wins. (Less laundry to do, huzzah!) If nobody’s hit that limit yet, pass the Starting Player marker clockwise and start picking new targets!
Because of the 10-point end-of-game, there’s a 9 Point Rule that says once you’re at nine points, you’re immune to damage from yourself or from events; in other words, it has to be another player that knocks you out. There’s also no hand limit, and a guide for if you want to mix unused character actions into the deck. Apparently the ratio of actions to Toppings to Conditions to Food should be 1:1:1:4. Feel free to use that information for strategic purposes.
While the many different actions can make this game seem complicated, it’s not hard to get the hang of. If there’s anything you’re still confused by, though, there’s a reference section in the rules with more thorough explanations for all the actions and events, including some of the expansion packs! All in all, Cafe Chaos is fun, it’s goofy, and it’s exceptionally well thought-out.
