For those of you that have never played Uno, the basic goal of the game is to discard all the cards in your hand before another player. To discard a card, you have to match the top card on the discard pile with a card which corresponds to it via colour, symbol or number. It’s not as simple as it sound however; action cards make appearances and cause certain events to happen which range from draw two, reverse turn order, skip a turn and change the pile’s colour. Failure to discard a card from your hand means you have to pick up an extra card.
Skip-Bo is a slightly more advanced Maths based game. There are four building piles of cards which must be stacked in the numerical order (1 to 12). Once the stack reaches its limit, the pile starts over again. Your main goal is to get rid of the 20 cards placed in your stockpile but the complicated part is that you can only use the card which is on top of the pile. At the start of each turn, you are given enough cards to bring your hand to five and once you’ve finished your turn, you must place one card from your hand into one of your four discard piles. The discard piles are used in a similar vein to the cards in your hand, but the same rule with the stockpile cards applies; you can only use the top cards in each discard pile.
Hit me.
The game manages to include a few options and settings to change the game slightly including a points scheme, best out of 'x' amount of rounds and an elimination ranking process. You can also choose an alternate cards option to add twists such as the reverse card in Uno, alternatively allowing you to change the colour of the pile as well as reverse the turn order. Generally though, these are more of an annoyance and hurt the pace of the gameplay because the computer players constantly use the alternative cards. To get an idea of how frustrating this is; several times during our play through the game, somehow the alternate reverse card was used three or more times between two computer players at the one time.
Uno & Skip-Bo also has multiplayer support for up to four players. Sadly, this is not via a cable connection but rather a single console and cart. That’s right - you’ll have to pass around the one console between friends, which is time consuming and loses the fast paced action which you would experience with the old cardboard version.
Graphically, the game is under average and uses simple motions and shuffling effects for the cards. You are able to select the backgrounds which appear during gameplay sessions but they’re generally just a bunch of shapes moving around in a continuous loop, while others are simply still images. It is generally nothing you wouldn’t find in most flash-based games. Likewise, the audio portions of the game let you select the music track that plays in the background and is just a simple ten second loop.
There’s not exactly anything wrong with Uno & Skip-Bo, as it still manages to capture the essence of the card games - but lets face it, the real thing is better when playing with friends. If you’re a big fan of the card games but fail to find anyone to play with, Uno & Skip-Bo may just prove to fix your cravings. Otherwise, you can always play Solitaire on your PC.
). Being able to play it anywhere will be brilliant.
Meaning I tend to get lynched a lot for enforcing the "No Skip-Bo card on a Skip-Bo card" rule.
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