Orbita
- Board's Eye View
- Mar 4
- 2 min read
Designed by Geonil and published by Korea Boardgames, Orbita can best be described as a trick-taking card game. That's a tentative description, however, because tho' Orbita's cards come in four suits, none of the cards have a rank or number! Oh, and rather than following suit, in this two-player game the only prohibition is on playing cards in the same suit as was led!
There are seven cards in each suit, so 28 in all, and players are each dealt 14 cards. It's imperative that you resist the pressing impulse to organise your hand because, just like in Scout (Oink Games), cards must remain as they came out in the randomising shuffle. You lead by playing 1-3 cards from any suit but you can only play two or three cards if they happen to be immediately adjacent in your hand. If you have adjacent cards, you must play them together; you cannot make the choice of just playing just one of them and leaving the others in your hand. Of course as you play cards from your hand you will find that previously separated cards are subsequently adjacent.
Your opponent similarly plays one or more cards from their hand in a different suit. The markers for the suits are advanced along an 'orbit' track according to the number of cards of that suit that have been played, ignoring already occupied spaces, and the trick is won by the player who played the suit that is on a higher number in the orbit track.
The game ends when a player cannot play any cards, either because their hand is exhausted or because the only cards left are in the same suit as has just been led by the other player. At that point you determine who has the majority in each suit, but in a final tricksy twist the points you score for winning in a suit is the number of cards held by your opponent in that suit. That means it's best to win by the narrowest possible majority (4:3). If you end up with all seven cards in a suit, you'll score zero points for it.
Orbita is a remarkably clever little game that plays in just 10-15 minutes. The tricksy majority scoring means you may well want to finesse cards into your opponent's cache by deliberately losing tricks, albeit that losing a trick gives them the lead and so the initiative on the next trick... Even tho' it has a playing board, the card game comes in a compact pocket-size box, so it's eminently suitable as a game to pack for your holidays.
