Muster
- Board's Eye View
- 12 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Spencer Lloyd Thomas, Muster: Raise the Banners is a two-player game featuring the cartoon art of Pedro R M Andreo and published by Play Monkey Games. Tho' there's a board representing the five 'castles' (the five different coloured suits), this is an area control card game. Does it pass muster?
Each turn you play a card and draw a card to take your hand size back up to five cards. You play a card to your side of the castle board, placing it immediately below its matching colour. Subsequently, at that location you can only play a card of the same value as the top card or just one higher. At the end of the game, you tot up the total value of the cards you've played to each colour and compare it with your opponent's total; the winner of the game being the player who wins more locations - usually three out of five.
Because you can never play cards of lower value than those you've already played of that colour it's a no brainer to place out any value 1 cards early on in the game; but what do you do if you start off with those potentially very valuable 4 and 5 strength cards in your hand? If you play them to your side of the castle at the start you'll be locking yourself off from playing any of the lower value cards. The game offers the option of playing a card instead to the board itself. While there, cards don't count towards either player's total but the top card on each colour is available for either player to draw. This allows for tactical hand management, and an element of push your luck: you don't want to be making available the very cards that your opponent needs...
There's more. There are some rainbow cards that can be played to any colour location either as a wizard with a value of five or as a bridge, substituting for any other card. When you play a card as a bridge, you get to play a second card on top of the bridge that turn. There are also rainbow castle cards that are played to any colour location on the board and which allow players to play any colour card at that location. However, your opponent can always take a wizard/bridge card into their own hand by substituting the equivalent value card (for example, if you play a rainbow bridge as a 3 strength green card so you can play a 4 strength green card on top, your opponent can take the rainbow card by replacing it with a 3 strength green card). You can also negate the ongoing effect of rainbow castle by placing a card of the appropriate colour on top of it.
Muster is a light easy-to-play card game that plays in a filler-length 10-15 minutes. It may look super-simple on the face of it but the more you play the more you appreciate the scope the rules offer for card manipulation, as well as deduction and bluff as you try to work out what cards your opponent has in hand based on which cards they've played...
