Giraffe Raffe
- Board's Eye View
- 20 minutes ago
- 2 min read
In most card shedding games you want to be the first player to completely deplete your hand of cards. That's not the case tho' in Hisashi Hayashi's Giraffe Raffe, from Mandoo Games. Tho' you're shedding cards in this game, you don't want to run out of cards because the game is lost by the player who is unable to make a play on their turn...
Giraffe Raffe has a deck of 60 cards with numbers 1-15 in four different coloured suits, and players each start off with a hand of 12-15 cards, depending on player count. Tiles are laid out that show the various cards that can be played to that location. Depending on the number of players, there will be 1-4 tiles accepting a single card (one per colour in a 4-5 player game; a red/yellow and blue/green tile in a 3-player game and a solitary tile accepting cards of all four colours in a 2-player game), and a tile for pairs, three of a kind, four of a kind, a straight (three or more cards in a run) and a flush (a run of three or more cards that are all the same colour). There's also a tile that will accept any three cards. Some tiles give a reward for playing to them: draw an additional card or take an apple token. Apple tokens can be discarded to pass your turn (ie: not play any cards but still remain in the game).
This is a 'ladder climbing' game. That means that when cards are played to a tile, it ups the ante for that tile because the next card(s) played there must beat the last card(s) played. If I play a pair of 10s to the pair tile, then that tile can only accept pairs of cards ranked at 11 or more. For tiles that take a straight, a flush or any combination of cards, subsequent plays must use more cards.
Tho' the cute artwork pitches Giraffe Raffe as a children's game, and gameplay is intuitively easy, this is a game with some tactical depth and some push-your-luck gambles. It's actually also quite 'take that': if you play a pair of 15s, for example, you're preventing any other player from playing a pair because it's impossible to play anything higher at that tile location.
We've hugely enjoyed our plays of Giraffe Raffe at all player counts but the game works particularly well as a two-player tactical tussle, not least because at higher player counts it's a game that generates a loser rather than an individual winner. Games typically take no more than 15 minutes, so it makes for an entertaining filler. The game also comes with rules to accommodate solitaire play against a 'giraffe robot', represented by a cardboard standee :-)
