10£ for unlimited fun?

With limited suitcase space, and shelf space generally becoming a premium at home, we were looking to bring home cool small box games from UKGE 2024.
Even though I didn’t know much about Odin, I was somehow drawn to it so I decided we should just buy it.
Turns out it was an amazing idea! Let me show you why.

Gameplay

This is one of those games that is a bit hard to explain, but is actually easy to understand if you just start playing. But I’ll try to quickly describe some nuances.

It's a card-shedding game: you want to get rid of your cards as fast as possible.
Each round players start out with 9 cards, and the round ends when someone plays their last card. Every other player gets points equal to the number of cards left in their hands.
When someone reaches 15 points the game is over, and whoever has the least points wins.

The deck has 6 colors of cards, numbered from 1 to 9 in every color.

Your goal is to play cards with a higher value than the previous cards. First there is only a single card played, but following players will be able to play one more card than previously played. Cards played are basically digits of a number: for example playing a 2, 3 and 4 would be ‘432’ (you always have to make the biggest possible number with the digits).
But a quintessential rule: either the color or the value of the cards have to be the same, or else you cannot play them together.

This means that sometimes people won’t be able to follow up on number. When everyone has to pass you discard the last cards, then the player who played them gets to go again and start a new round!

To put a twist on things, after playing you have to take back one card from the previous number, and this makes it all much much more interesting. What the previous player played influences your decision more than just having to play a bigger number.

Thoughts

First it all seemed a bit random, but there is certainly some skill involved in what you play and what you draw back. Ultimately luck of the draw plays a role, but there are also multiple rounds until someone reaches 15 points, so you never feel like you are out of the game. The more we play, the more we grow in love with it. It has that quick, fun, ‘just one more' feeling that e.g. Love Letter has, and we keep coming back for more.
The aesthetics of the cards and box is a cherry in top, and I especially like the thin-strip design of the cards.