No Thanks!

Chris Allen of Skotos introduced me to a cool card game I hadn’t seen before called No Thanks! It’s got deceptively simple gameplay, simple enough that my kids were able to pick it up in no time, but it’s also a fun game for adults.

There’s cards numbered 3 through 35. You shuffle the deck, and then remove 9 random cards, so that there’s gaps in the sequence. Hide those, nobody gets to see which ones they were. Each player is also given a fixed number of chips.

A player drtaws a card and puts it face up. If they want it, they take it. If they don’t want it, they place a token, and the next player gets to decide whether to take it or put in a chip to reject it. When someone takes it, they get all the tokens on the card as well as the card itself. If you have no tokens, you are forced to take the card whether you want to or not.

At the end of the game, you add up the face values of the cards, and subtract the number of tokens you have. If you build runs of cards in sequence, such as 21, 22, 23, 24, only the lowest card counts (remember, some of the cards are missing, so some sequences canno tbe completed!). Lowest score wins, so you are trying to keep from getting lots of high-value cards, and trying to maximize the number of tokens you have.

Very much a game of card-counting and judging odds; quite fun, though, with a hefty dose of luck making for fun reversals. And it plays really fast.

Edit: corrected how high the cards go, per the comment below.