Curating a collection of trophies
Open Season is a card-drafting game. The very basic structure of the game might sound simple at first: 👉 Each turn you will pick 2 cards from the display, placing 1 on your board and 1 into a scoring pile. Repeat this over 11 rounds and you count up points. But don’t fret, it is all a lot more layered than it might seem! 😉 The game also does the cool role-reversal theme: instead of playing as do-gooder adventurers, you are the big-baddie 👹, who got fed up with all those pesky people looting his dungeon, so you decide to decorate with them as trophies to ward them off. 😈
Cards are the most essential part of the game so let’s go over them first: there are cards of 6 classes: dwarves, gnomes, elves, mages, sorcerers and barbarians. These can all have 1 of 5 attributes: earring, tattoo, dagger, crown or eyepatch. The art funnily reflects this information. 🙃
Your player board is the other piece of the puzzle. It is double-sided for 2 game modes, but the main one has 11 slots for cards. As with any good drafting game, you have to obey different rules for placement, that will sometimes contradict each other, so you need to make clever choices and some compromises.
The top row of your board has 4 abilities. These trigger if you put a card into your scoring pile matching the class in the ability slot. With these you can do some nice combos, as you could draft additional cards that trigger another ability. This makes these slots beneficial to fill first, however there are other slots that give you a bonus if you fill them in the first few rounds! 😮
The top and bottom rows require different character classes in each slot. 2 slots will make you lose points for cards of those classes in your scoring pile, while another 2 will give you points. Yet another slot scores for having a majority! There is also a set-collection element for the attributes! 🙀 So you see it is both important what you draft for your player board and for your scoring pile! Balancing these is a delicate act.
Of course there are even more rules and nuances to follow but I hope this gives you a nice taste of Open Season. It’s really quick, snappy and FUN! 😊
