Open
- Board's Eye View
- Apr 2
- 2 min read
Open is a 2-4 player 'climbing & shedding' card game designed by Takashi Saito where you score points for being the first to get rid of all your cards and for predicting the player to shed their cards first. This edition is illustrated by Qurage and published by Mandoo Games.
The game uses an irregular deck of 26 cards in just two suits (red and black). The cards are numbered Ace to 10 in both suits but tho' there is just one 6-9 card in each suit, there are two Ace-5 and #10 cards in black but only one of each in red. As you might guess from the title, Open is played with partially open hands: players are each dealt six cards, of which four are face up and just two are face down, so known only to the player. Even in a four-player game not all the cards will be in play.
Once players have looked over all the open hands on the table and recorded their hidden predictions on a dial, the hand is played. Whatever card is led, the next player must either pass or play a card of higher rank in the same suit. If a player leads with a pair of cards, they can only be followed by a pair of the exact same colour combination; for example, if a player leads with a red and black 4, that can only be topped with a pair of higher rank that's also made up of a red and a black card. The only other special rule is that the Aces are ordinarily considered to count as 1 unless they are played on a 10, in which case they count as 11: you can't, for example, play an Ace on a 9.
If you're playing Open with three or four players, you can play a variant where players all start off with points tokens and they choose how many to hazard on their prediction of the winner of the hand. Like the standard rules, the intention is that you play till one player has amassed a set number of points, but just beware that there's a possibility that what Takashi Saito describes as 'careless' gambling could make this variant never ending!
That caveat aside, Open makes for a fun filler. Our plays at Board's Eye View have never been never-ending; they mostly ran to around 15-20 minutes.
