We at FRONTROWREVIEWS have been playing loads over the last few weeks. Some of these games have been great others less so. Some have been family friendly and others adult only. But with Xmas so close, a family friendly game was essential!
ABANDON ALL ARTICHOKES
PLAYERS 2-4 / Ages 10+ / Time 20 mins
What happens when you have a bumper crop of delicious veg that fights back? The patch is in peril and there is only one thing that you can do to survive, ABANDON ALL ARTICHOKES! Prune the deck by harvesting fresh vegetables, use there powers to fully effect, be that swap cards, discard cards, or compost cards. Sometimes luck, often strategy, and even a touch of the green thumb is needed to win!
THE GAME
ABANDON ALL ARTICHOKES is relatively simple to play. Start by dealing 10 artichokes to all players. Give them also a reference card (this is only for the first few games to be honest). Then shuffle all other cards (with any artichokes removed and put back in the box.) Place them in a set which is called the garden stack and deal 5 cards as the garden row next to it. All players now get 5 cards. Create a discard pile on the other side of your personal patch, so this is the discard pile for future.
Now the fun begins!
There are 5 phases in each round and they roughly are like this –
Replenish – Get the garden row up to 5 cards by revealing cards from the top of the garden stack until there are 5 cards. If you ever have 4 of the same, shuffle and draw again (it does happen).
Harvest – The active player takes a card from the garden row. One card. Only one card. Add it to your hand.
Play – Here is what you have been waiting for. Play any number, yes, any number. 0 is a number! Play cards in front of you. These all have specific actions and allow players to discard, pick up, compost or any number of other fun things.
Discard – All cards that have been played and not, to the discard pile.
Draw 5 – And top up, back to five!
The winner is the person without any artichokes in their hand at the end of a round. They call out ABANDON ALL ARTICHOKES! Then win. Hopefully to have a lovely veggie burger or something…
REVIEW
We delighted in many of the atributes of ABANDON ALL ARTICHOKES. For kids, two things stuck out. First, its the playability of it all. The ease of the phases. The simple structure delivers enough ‘strategy’ and light enough for them to revel in. Second, we found that they also liked the lack of sadistic veggie actions. Actions are fair and not arbitrary. Its like a nicer version of the brilliant ORGAN ATTACK. With as much fun in the artistry but with no nuclear options. Thirdly, the games are closer because of this. For adults there is less to offer but we are not its target audeince, nor should we be. Its not a overly clever game, but it is really very fun
