Step into the shoes of a gangster

We are always on the lookout for 2-player games, so when we heard Pandasaurus is releasing District Noir (which is a re-release of an older game), we were immediately intrigued. 🙂 It’s a pure card game with a gangster theme, as you and your opponent fight for control of the city. ⚔️ As expected the theme is quite pasted on, but I’m quite fond of the monochromatic card art, that makes everything easily readable at a glance.

The game flow is really simple, yet full of difficult choices. At the beginning of a round you both get 5 cards and play for 6 turns - on your turn you either play a card to the central card row, or take the last 5 cards of it. 🧐 You choose when you want to take cards, but you can only do it once in a round! At the end of the round you will have no more cards in your hands - whatever you take from the row is placed before you.

You are trying to gather sets of the 4 suits and also majorities in these suits. You can also gather plus and minus cards, that simply modify your score at the end. Whoever has the most points at the end of the 4th round wins! 🏆 Though there is another victory condition‼️ The deck has 3 city 🌆 cards as well - if you manage to gather all 3 you immediately win the game. This adds a nice additional layer that can strongly influence your decisions.

Every round is a balancing act ⚖️: you want to make the card row good enough for you to take, but not overly attractive for your opponent, while also looking at who currently has more of a card type. A city card isn’t worth anything alone, but if you manage to take 2 of them, your opponent will be in a really tight spot, as they cannot allow you to get the 3rd one. There are also 3 cards randomly removed at setup, so you don’t know for sure what cards are in play. Games are fast so you could play best of 3s or best of 5s for an epic gangster showdown. 💪