Pyramid Review
Loco!
Published by Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.
Game design by Reiner Knizia
Graphic design by Brian Schomburg
Edited by Christian T. Petersen & Darrell Hardy
Full-color boxed game with 30 cards, 25 tokens in five colors, & rules sheet; $6.95
While board games in the current market get bigger and come with heftier, more involved components, card games seem to be getting smaller, faster, and easier, and none of them seem to suffer a loss in playability from the miniaturization process. Loco!, a new card game from the combined efforts of Reiner Knizia, Fantasy Flight Games, and Esdevium Games, keeps the ball rolling.
The object of the game is to collect the most points by taking the most valuable tokens by the end of the game.
Loco! utilizes five colors, matched to both the playing cards and the accompanying chips. These 25 tokens are separated by color before the game begins and placed in the center of the table in five little color-coded piles. The cards are dealt out to the players, and play goes clockwise.
The deck contains a full suit of six cards in each color; these are numbered one to five, plus a Loco!/zero-value card. On a player's turn, he plays a card from his hand to the table, and places it next to the chip pile of the same color (red cards beside red tokens, etc.). He then takes a token of any color from one of the piles (not necessarily the same color as the card he played). If you play the Loco! card, you must say "Loco!" or you lose your token draw.
. . .This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 12, 2004
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