Fives and Duos – The CMYK Magenta Line, Part 1

The Magenta line feels like the right thing at the right time. One of the big recent trends in tabletop gaming has been the popularization of small footprint card games. The Crew really shook the earth and sparked a wave of creative trick-takers whose impact spilled over into other similar games of historically traditional style. Card shedders, poker, blackjack, and rummy influenced designs are popping up every which way. The Magenta series is of similar ilk, with publisher CMYK revitalizing four previously published titles with a unified visual presentation.

The press release reads: “In a world of increasing digital distractions, Magenta is set to revive a classic way we gather and play – making face-to-face connections through card game nights with family, friends, and new faces around the table.”

This spirit is evident throughout each of these designs.

While all of these games are worthy of separate reviews covering their subtleties and character, I’ve decided to organize my thoughts into two distinct articles with each covering a pair of the titles. This allows me to bookend the series of reviews with the prelude you’re reading now, as well as a postlude with some broader thoughts on this product and its cultural meaning. So without farther hesitation, Part 1: Fives and Duos.

Taiki Shinzawa’s Fives kicks off the series in remarkable fashion. This is the lone trick-taker of the quadrilogy, and it was previously available outside North America under the name The Green Fivura. It boasts two crucial twists that make for a sometimes cerebral and deceptive experience. The foundation is conventional, however, requiring players to follow the led suit and then awarding the trick to the highest played card. It’s comfortable and straightforward, right up until it isn’t.

The first curve is that each card can be used as a magenta suit with a value of five. You just play the card facedown which shows a magenta five on the back. Hence, Fives. Now, you still must follow the lead, so a green three cannot be played as a magenta five if a green one was led. There is one exception here, in that your final card in any given suit may instead be played as a magenta five. Oh, and only one magenta five can be played each trick. Sometimes you want to play one even if you don’t, just to prevent someone else the opportunity.

There’s some weirdness here. The good kind. For instance, if blue is led and your only blue card is a two, do you play it faceup or facedown? The latter seems initially obvious. Play your blue two facedown so no one knows what you killed and it’s harder to count cards. Since you play through the entire deck in a given hand, light card awareness is certainly a consideration.

But you may want to play that two face-up. It doesn’t hide the fact that this card is now out of the game, but it does preserve the mystery of whether you’ve run out of blue cards in your hand. If you would have played a magenta five, everyone would know you don’t have any blue left. Information on each player’s ability to manipulate tricks and how they may respond makes up much of Fives‘ strategic depth. This is because, like Hearts, you can really sabotage your opponents and twist the knife.

This is the second surprise. The goal isn’t just to win tricks. The card you play to win a trick is kept faceup in your play area and contributes to your total score at the end of the hand. The player whose total score is closest to 25 is the winner, receiving three victory points. Second and third are awarded sequentially less end game points. Here’s the delightful part – if you go over 25 you bust and must kick one of your point tokens into the pot for the winner. This opens up all kinds of dickery. It’s what makes Fives come alive.

There is all kinds of jockeying for position. If a player wins a couple of tricks with high value cards, you can safely bet that the table is going to do their damnedest to push the aggressive player over the 25-point cliff. This threshold also makes for extremely cutthroat play near the end of a hand.

Imagine leading the final card. You better not have a silver trump or you’re absolutely screwed. You should be trying to bury those earlier in the round so you don’t get stuck in this position. Let’s say you have a green seven. If you play it faceup, you’re very likely to win the trick. The magenta five gives at least one of your opponent’s an out, as they’re able to hide a higher green or a trump card. But you could lead with a magenta five, right? Sure, but if no one else has a magenta or silver, then you’re taking five points. Hopefully you don’t have a current score of 21 or higher for the hand.

The push-your-luck aspect is fantastic. There’s a strong subtle quality to this game where it takes on the demeanor of a family style trick-taker but then takes a sharp turn and creates opportunity for malevolence. Unlike bog-standard trick-takers, there are no automatic plays. Every trick is a process of managing your hand and setting yourself up to gun for 25. It has an edge that is enthralling. It’s the type of simple yet sly game that runs across my thoughts later in the evening when I should be trying to fall asleep.

The only hindrances I’ve detected are somewhat minor. One is that first plays are confusing, as newcomers struggle to grasp when you’re able to play a magenta five. This is unfortunate and stands in contrast to the intuitiveness of the rest of the design. The second issue is that players can sometimes fall behind in victory points and be out of the game going into the final hand. The door to a massive comeback isn’t entirely shut, as forcing other players to bust and subsequently winning the hand can result in a large swing, but this is a crapshoot and extremely unlikely. Neither of these qualities really squander the game’s potential or leave it permanently marked.

Shinzawa has become one of the most celebrated trick-taking designers in recent years. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with his oeuvre, so I cannot say how this compares to Ghosts of Christmas or Maskmen. I can tell you that this is the Magenta line game that has most strongly captured my interest. There are layers of tension and thoughtfulness here that emerge upon successive plays like a kaleidoscope shooting through my nerves. There’s just a touch of this cerebral quality without demanding it, allowing for players to engage it lightly or with fervor. There’s also a sense of playfulness, allowing for explosive moments of trash talking as you bomb someone’s round and bury their score. It balances the social and heady elements expertly.

This is such a fantastic lead-in to the Magenta line, yet it can set one’s expectations unfairly high. While I wouldn’t say any of the subsequent titles reach the achievement of Fives, they are all likewise interesting games that share a core philosophy and threshold for quality.

Duos is an updated edition of Johannes Schmidauer-König’s 2015 release Team Play. This is the most Magenta of the first wave of this series, in that it offers an invigorated and cleverly adjusted take on a classic family game. Effectively, it’s Rummy with a team format and personal objective cards. These twists are meaningful in bringing the experience forward and into the paradigm of modern card game design. This is a very solid title that provides easy satisfaction, even if it’s not as gripping or unusual as Fives.

The ruleset, like its Magenta peers, is concise and straightforward. On your turn you can draw two cards from among the faceup offer or the top of the deck. You can also play cards from your hand to fulfill your personal objective card. These consist of goals such as a run of three numbers, four blue cards with odd values, or two pairs of different colors. There’s a charitably sized deck of objectives and a solid variety. Finally, you can pass up to two cards to your teammate. You both are cooperating to fulfill your own objectives, but you score them all together at end game.

One of the best aspects of Duos is the player-driven tempo. The objective cards you seek to accomplish are worth a varying number of points depending on their difficulty. Some can be completed right away with only a couple of cards. Others require you carefully build your hand over a few turns, perhaps with the aid of your team-member. With the game ending after a team has completed eight total objectives, there is a degree of pressure players can leverage by favoring shorter goals and cranking out missions as quickly as possible.

This is not nearly as subtle as Fives and instead leans into broadly appealing card play. The most alluring sensation is the pleasurable dopamine hits delivered via setting up your teammate and clocking an assist. Due to strict rules on no communication, there’s an opportunity for rewarding play by observing your teammate and correlating what they pluck from the available card row with their faceup objective. Unfortunately, this is really the sole creative space in the game, for the rest of it feels almost too forthright.

This analysis is grounded in the idea that the most important facet of Duos is what you draw. Cards cannot be used in multiple ways, so you either draw something useful for an objective or you don’t. There’s a touch of wit in that a single shared public objective can be scored by anyone – thus forcing an occasional branching strategic decision in hand management – but still, the overriding feeling in this game is drawing a card and hoping to receive that internal rush of shouting bingo with all your insides.

Duos explicitly recognizes that its beholden to variance. A core mechanism is allowing you to mulligan your goal card. Every single time you draw one. It’s a bright highlighter on the game’s methodology of asking players to draw into success.

It sounds like I’m disappointed with Schmidauer-König’s work. That’s not quite true. This is assuredly a feel-good lightweight card game that has a touch of novelty. It’s certainly an interesting variant on Rummy and games of that tradition, and I’ve enjoyed my time with it. I’d affirm the request to sit down and play Duos this very instant. It’s just so easy and reliable.

Despite much reflection, my lack of deeper summary here says much. Those wanting for something mind-blowing are coming to the table with too high of expectations. Instead, look to Fives or Figment, the latter of which I will be examining in part two. Duos is comfortable and interesting. This is the center point of the series and forms the baseline for the other designs to orbit around. Holistically, it’s a merry no-nonsense card game with a framework that flirts with timeless sensation. It’s the type of thing to accompany drinking and eating, and to share each other’s company.

Keep an eye out for part two where I discuss Figment, Fruit Fight, and observations on the Magenta line as a whole.

 

A review copy of each of these games was provided by the publisher.

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