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How hard can it be to remember two cards? A lot harder than you might think. ChopChop is a fiendishly simple game of memory and strategy combined. Let’s find out if you’re up to the challenge.
Setup
Setup is really simple. Shuffle the deck and deal a set of cards to each player, known as their ‘pod’. For a beginner game, a 2x2 set of cards is recommended, though the game offers some easy opportunities to scale the difficulty by increasing the size of the starting pods to 2x3 or even 2x4. If you choose to play with the max player count of 10, you’re probably better off using lower pod sizes otherwise you’ll get through the deck really quickly.
Put the remainder of the deck in the centre of the table and you’re almost ready to begin.
The beauty of ChopChop is that it’s a game of almost purely hidden information, including information you might even hide from yourself if you can’t remember your cards.
Before you begin, each player looks at the bottom two cards in their pod. Remembering the value of the cards as well as their exact location is really important. This is the only chance you’ll get to look at these cards (without the benefit of a special power card), so commit them to memory.
Then turn the top of the deck over to start a discard pile and you’re ready to begin.
How Do You Win
ChopChop is played over a number of rounds that is decided between the players, though the rules suggest you play five rounds to determine the winner. The player with the lowest overall score after those rounds wins. There are five negative cards (from -1 to -5) and then five of each card from 1-9. Finally there are four of each type of the three special power cards. These let you either:
Look at a single card - helpful if you’ve forgotten your bottom two cards, or if you want to know what one of your top cards is
Swap any two cards – this can allow you to swap one of your cards with an opponents, or swap cards between two different opponents if you’re feeling particularly devilish
Look at any two cards and swap them if you wish – this is a great card to help you see what your top cards are all at once. Or to look at what an opponent has, compare it to your pod and then swap if it’s favourable.
Playing The Game
Turns are pretty quick. On your turn you’ll take either the top card of the discard pile, or the top card of deck and decide whether you want to swap it for a card in your pod or not. For the cards you’ve hopefully remembered the value of, that should be easy. But choosing to swap it for a card you’ve not yet seen is a bold move. Cards are never face up in your pod so there’s a lot riding on how well you remember what’s what. And where.
When you discard a card, if it’s a special card, you get to activate that power. So taking a “look at any card” card from the deck and discarding it will allow you to view any one card – you don’t need to add it to your pod to activate it.
There’s also a very neat additional power that’s available to everyone each time a card is discarded. As soon as a card hits the pile, if it matches a card you have, you can remove it from your pod as a free action, reducing the overall number of cards you have left. Only the first player to do this each turn gets the benefit. We’ve adopted a house rule of shouting “Chop!” to signify you were the first – especially with a lot of players who might not all be within equally easy reach of the discard pile.
This is another area where your powers of memory are really important. If you go to discard (or shout “Chop!”) and you reveal a non-matching card, you get a penalty card. Taking the top card from the deck, you place it face down at the side of your pod, and you’ll have to score that at the end of the round. You can never look at, swap or discard penalty cards. Otherwise they’d be a rubbish penalty.
Ending The Round… & The Game
If you’re confident you have the lowest score, at any time during your turn you can shout “ChopChop!” and that immediately ends the round. Everyone turns over all their cards and totals their score. Number cards are worth their stated values, and special cards are worth 10 each.
If you declared “ChopChop!” and had the lowest score, you get a bonus of -5, reducing your score further. If you ended the round but didn’t have the lowest score, you get +5 to your total.
Shuffle up and go again until you’ve played your five rounds.
How Is It?
We’ve played this a lot and it’s quickly become a family favourite. Introducing it to friends has been fun, with the idea that keeping track of initially just two cards should be easy but proves quite devilish.
There’s some clever strategy to it as well – if you draw a card you know you have in your pod, you’re able to quickly discard it and then ‘chop’ the other one out of your pod, giving you fewer cards and less chance of a high score.
There’s practically zero downtime – turns are quick and straightforward and so games don’t drag on. The possibility of looking at or taking opponents cards means there’s a lot of player interaction as well. As with all games like this, you’ll need your own pencil and paper to track scores but that’s no hardship.
The lead can change hands quite often too – it’s rare that someone takes an early lead and routinely closes it out. In fact we’ve had a number of games where people have gone from first to last in the final round.
There’s no restriction on when you decide to “ChopChop!” so a favourable deal and a good first draw might mean that you’re the only person that gets a turn on a particular round, though this isn’t usual.
Final Thoughts
We like this a lot, and the tin it comes in fits easily in a bag making it very portable. The player count of 2-10 means it works for almost any group and the scaling of difficulty with different pod sizes is great additional flexibility.
There’s a real instinct to turn cards over (and that’s happened to us quite a bit) so when you first start playing it’s something to keep an eye on. The completely hidden information is really interesting to play against - both for yourself and your opponents. If you’ve played something like SkyJo where low scores win you rounds, but information becomes increasingly public, this feels familiar but challenging at the same time.
It's a really good lightweight game that would definitely find a home in any family’s collection.