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Stick to Colours

Bidding by refusing

You collect victory points with card combination. The game features cards in three colors, values 1-9, there are more cards of 1-6 than of 7-9. Each player has a set of double-sided bidding or Refusal markers, showing “?” and “X”. You start with two cards in hand and 5-6 open-faced cards in a market display.

The starting player chooses one card from the market; if you does not want to, the next in turn does so, etc. The other players decide if they want to bid for the card or pass. If you bid, you put one of your refusal markers, “?” up, on a card in the market that you do not want to have, never in all of the game. Every other bidder in turn must place one marker more than the previous bidder, but can put markers on cards that have been previously refused by one or several players, and you can also put down cards face-down from your hand and put a marker “X”  on them. The last bidder gets the chosen card. Refused cards from players’ hands and cards marked “X” go out of play and the markers back to their owners. Cards with markers of all players but one go to this player, the markers to their owners. Remaining cards stay in the display, markers are turned over to “X” and the market is refilled. When the draw pile is empty, you score for sets of three identical numbers in different colors or for straights of the same color.

A very unusual and very good game; the “inverted“ bidding to refuse something to get something else demands long-term planning and consistent implementation. It is worth your while to fight with the really badly written rules, the game is fun! But a little bit more editorial work would have been well invested.

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 20+

Designer: Ilya Proshin

Artist: Valentina Yegorova, Ilya Panfilov

Price: ca. 9 Euro

Publisher: GaGa Games 2015

Web: www.gaga-games.ru

Genre: Cards, auction

Users: With friends

Version: multi

Rules: en ru

In-game text:

Comments:

Minimalistic and abstract

Unusual, clever and interesting mechanism

Rules very badly written

The game is worth working them out!

Compares to:

First game of this kind

Other editions:

Currently none

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 3

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0