A ladder climbing duel of two Chinese clans

🎎Chu Han from @studiomatagot is a ladder-climbing & card-shedding game - a genre of card games that we really fell in love with recently. We were actually surprised to find Chu Han available at GenCon as it was only announced for demoing, so we had to get a copy! 😉 It is a game for 2p, where players take the roles of the rival Han and Chu clans. 

In a climbing game players play higher and higher cards or sets of cards until someone cannot do it anymore, which ends the current round, with rounds continuing until someone gets rid of all their cards. This is exactly what you’ll be doing here but to understand the gameplay, we have to investigate the deck of cards: 🕵️ There are cards going from value ‘1’ to value ‘9’, but ☝️ there are 9 ‘1’s, 8 ‘2’s, 7 ‘3’s, etc. and only 1 ‘9’. There is also a value ‘0’ card which acts as a joker. Players start out with 15 random cards each, with the remaining 16 acting as a deck.

When leading a round you have to play a set of cards with the same value. Then for the rest of the round only sets with that many cards can be played, but always of higher values. Due to the limit of certain values there will be a limited amount of possible reactions.

Before choosing your cards you can choose to draw 2 more cards. This can help as you could get essential cards for better sets, but it also hinders you as your goal is to get rid of cards. If someone runs out of cards they get points depending on how many cards their opponent has remaining and how many times they drew cards. You reshuffle cards and continue playing until someone has 30+ points.

To spice things up, there are some special cards with abilities. Optionally you also can play with event cards that give special rule twists for the whole hand. These are great and in my opinion a must-have. 🙃 Finally, there is a little campaign mode included, which we haven’t tried yet. 

💭Even though we have played a bunch of games already, with these card games it's hard to gauge how the random hand of cards you get influences your chances, but there is certainly skill in choosing sets. Being able to lead a round is super powerful, so you should do everything to keep the initiative.