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A bidding, area-majority style game as big as a pack of chewing gum? Is IRK going to leave you with a… (minty) fresh… appreciation of small games? Read on to find out!
Introduction
I originally came across the Pack O Game series from Perplext as I was working out what games I could easily and reasonably pack to take on holiday for 10 days. Space and weight is always at a premium when you’re flying anywhere so I was really intrigued when I stumbled upon IRK as my gateway into this series.
Setup
As you’d imagine for something so small, the setup is pretty straightforward, and the rules are too! Shuffle the 30 gum-shaped cards and deal seven to each player – keep them secret, keep them safe! If you’re playing with two or three people, put five cards face up in the centre of the table as a starting shared tableau, and for a four player game, lay the remaining two cards out instead.
Get bidding
IRK is played over seven rounds, each of which is either a ‘bid’ or ‘centre’ round, following this pattern which is the entirety of the game: centre-centre-bid-centre-centre-bid.
On a ‘bid’ round, you choose one of your cards and place it face down in front of you. Each card has one of five different colours and some contain numbers or a starburst shape in the middle. At the end of the seventh round, you’ll total all the different colour symbols and the player with the highest colour score will get the points from the middle. Ties are broken by number of starburst symbols.
On a ‘centre’ round you again place a card face down in front of you and then everyone simultaneously reveals. The first player (who keeps the game box as a handy first player token) then places their card into the communal tableau. You’re allowed to cover some existing symbols but there are a few restrictions.
Cards must be played so that one of their three sections is either orthogonally adjacent to another card, or covering part of an existing card. You can only cover numbered icons with another number, and starbursts can only be covered by other starbursts. You’re also not allowed to cover more than one non-matching colour symbol, so hiding an entire card isn’t possible.
Cards have grey symbols on them which don’t count as colours so you can cover those up without it counting against these restrictions.
Is bigger better?
You’ll bid at the very beginning, in the middle of and then at the very end of the game. There’s a tricky trade-off that becomes apparent almost immediately – do you want to save higher value cards for bidding to try and guarantee a score, or would you rather play those into the tableau to get a higher potential score, but not know what your opponents are concealing for their bids?
This is sometimes harder than it sounds, especially at lower play counts where you can’t guarantee an equal distribution of colours in your cards. I’ve played two-player games where I’ve not had one or two colours in my hand, so your play style becomes more about point minimization for your opponent, which can feel less fun.
Scoring
After the final bid round, you reveal your cards and tot up the scores for each colour and then award points based on the majority. You’ll look at the tableau and count up all the symbols and numbers of a particular colour in a contiguous area. Crucially, the areas can contain grey symbols – you don’t need to have small clusters of colours as long as they can still be connected to each other through a larger area with some grey in it. This effectively means the grey sections become common to multiple colours at once.
Ties are first resolved by number of starburst icons on your bid cards, and if that doesn’t separate people, then in a 3-4 player game, everyone who tied gets half the available points (rounded down), and overall the most points wins.
Final thoughts
I think in part, the novelty of such a small game partly covers over some of the gameplay for me. I’ve got other Pack O Game titles that I think offer more. It feels harsh to be overly critical of a small, pretty well executed bidding majority game that fits in your pocket.
I like the simplicity of it and I love the portability and small footprint it has, meaning you can play this almost anywhere. It’s quick as well – selecting and playing or reserving one card doesn’t take long, regardless of player count. I think when I first played with two others, the rules and scoring explanation took about as long as the game itself.
There’s definitely some strategy in there too, and the trade-off between tryiig to guarantee a winning bid for a colour versus making it worthwhile from a points perspective can be difficult. The random layout of the cards can mean someone tries to cover your blue up for a higher green score which adds a third dimension to how you approach it.
Is it “fun”? My wife would say no, my daughter would say maybe and I’m a little on the fence. Are slightly more abstract puzzles intrinsically fun? I’d say probably not. Are those kinds of games that fit in your pocket and can be setup and played in about 10 minutes fun? Not massively – but I think they scratch a neat itch.
Of all the of these games I have, IRK was the one I always put in my bag on holiday for all those reasons. It plays up to four, it’s quick, it doesn’t need a lot of space and it’s simple. We had one game on holiday where we ordered lunch in a restaurant, played the game and packed up before our food arrived. I think that kind of experience is hard to find for under £10 these days.
