Number Chain
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 8
- 3 min read
Number Chain is a card shedding game for 2-4 players. It's designed by Woojin Yang and published by Korea Boardgames.
The game is played with a deck of cards in the range 11-77 (no cards with 0, 8 or 9). The deck also includes wild cards with ? in either the tens or units position. A display shows three cards available for players to draw, and there's a face-down draw deck. The main focus tho' is on the 'floor card' at the far end of the display. It's the card on top of this pile, read in conjunction with its accompanying 'condition tile' that determines what cards can be played...
When the condition tile is on its pink 'pivot' side, the first digit of all the cards you play must match the last digit of the floor card at the start of your turn. So if the floor card was 37, you could play any number of cards in the range 71-77, including wild cards with a ? in the first position. If the condition tile is on its blue 'relay' side, every card you lay becomes the new floor card, so if the floor card at the start of your turn was 37, you could, for example, play 74, 42, 21, 15 etc.
In addition, you can always play a chain of three consecutive numbers, in either ascending or descending order, and that can include a wild card. When you play a chain, the last card you place down becomes the new floor card, and you get immediately to take another turn.
It's possible you might want to take a card from those on display in order to set yourself up to play a chain but you'll mostly want to play cards if you can rather than picking any up. As your hand runs down tho' you're likely to find you don't have a card you can play. In that case you must draw from the face-down draw deck or take one of the three cards on display. Alternatively, a player can pick up all three of the face-up cards in the display and flip the condition tile...
The winner of each round is the first player to get rid of all their cards. Players take 1 penalty point for each card left in hand; 3 points for each wild card. You play three rounds and the overall winner is the player with the fewest penalty points.
This all makes for a light filler-length card game that you can play comfortably in around 20 minutes. This is a number pattern recognition game where you'll need to be on the lookout for synergies between the cards you have in hand and maybe to those in the display. If you're a card counter you'll be playing with a distinct advantage. You may find too that it's possible to make deductions about what cards others have in hand from the sequence of cards they play, and you may be able to set yourself up for a strong 'relay' run if the condition tile is in the appropriate position, but in the main - and especially with three or four players - Number Chain is likely to come down to the luck of the cards you and the other players happen to draw, but it's none the worse for that.
