well, this one is card game, but ‘determinedly cardful’ just didn’t work…

sounds more hectic than it is, but, to those who have been fortunate enuff to play it, the lesser known cousin to Uno (created by the makers of) is a more higher-grade and better game

i have no idea why it never took off like Uno but we were fortunate to discover this when i was still a kid and some friends introduced it to us and then gave us a pack – it would only be many years later when we would scour the internet for more packs, find most of them in Germany (the game has passed between different distributing companies a number of times) and import a bunch and spread them out between our friends.

you can actually get the full scoop of Rage in the wiki here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_%28card_game%29] but in a nutshell it is a bidding game, much like bridge, where you are dealt ten cards and need to guess/decide/ascertain how many tricks (a round of everyone playing one card) you are likely to win. You then play out the ten rounds and score points for bidding correctly while losing points for getting more or less than what you bid.

the game is brought to life by 5 different special action cards which add bonuses or change the colour of the trump (called the Rage) or can act as a Joker and these really spice things up.

you start with ten cards each and play them out. then nine cards each. and eight… and so on until the last round you have one card and have to bid on that.

the coolness of Rage is that it doesn’t matter what cards you get – good or bad – what matters is how you bid on them and then play them – part strategy, part luck, part special action cards, a game of Rage takes between 45min to an hour and a quarter and is a lot of quick fun

back in my student days there was a student house called Highbury in Rondebosch that i used to frequent and we used to play Rage thru the nite on many occasions which elicited the brett/dan sneaky “what’s the difference between 2am and 3am?” as we would engineer one more game…

definitely worth hunting down on the internet and scoring yourself a few packs, quick easy’ish game to teach and hours of fun…