Mada

If you haven’t come across them yet, HELVETIQ and Coiledspring publish a brilliant range of budget friendly pocket games. Literally, the boxes are 11cm tall and less than 7cm wide! But inside each little space is a huge amount of fun! Tucano, Bandido, Bandida, Kariba, Kinoko……and more! And, thanks to them, it never ceases to surprise me how much game I can carry around in the palm of my hand! They all offer something different. Artwork, mechanics, objectives – it’s a smorgasbord of colour and enjoyment! So when I saw MADA with its cute little ring-tailed lemur on the box, I instantly wanted to try it.

Being big fans of Tucano and the others in the range, I was hoping for quick, colourful, card play. And [SPOILER ALERT]; that’s exactly what we got! But that’s not the only thing we got!

To set the sunny scene, MADA is a card collecting, hand management, push-your-luck game for 2-5 players age 7+. Playing cheeky Madagascan lemurs, our goal is to gather as many delicious, if pricky, pears as possible by the time end-game comes around!

Set Up

Set up is super simple (just the way we like it!). Shuffle all the cards in the deck and give 3 to each player. Then pop the rest of the deck face down in the centre of the table for picking. That’s it! How MADA is that!? haha

Turn Up

And the rules are just as super streamlined. Each turn, you choose whether to:

• play a card from your hand face up into your prickly pear collection; or
• draw a card from the prickly pear deck; or
• take a risk!

When playing a card into your collection, you must be able to lay one card from your hand with a value which is at least the same or higher than the previous card placed there.

When drawing a card, you must have space. You can only ever have maximum 3 cards in your hand at a time.

If you can’t play and you can’t draw, you can still take a risk! You can always choose to be a risky Roger and do this anyway, but it is a handy 3rd way! Taking a risk means you draw blind from the top of the deck and add it to your collection. If the numeric value is equal or higher in value than the previous card you played, the round continues. If it is lower, BOOM! The round ends for everybody.

At the end of the round, each player then takes the top card from their collection and flips it face down and puts it to one side. This becomes everybody’s first of 5 end game scoring prickly pears!

Now, if you caused the round to end, you have to keep any cards in your hand for the next round. Everybody else can choose to keep or discard their cards. But nobody draws back up to three…ooh how MADAning for the round ender haha!

As play continues, a few cheeky characters might appear! And if you draw a special card, they have unique one-time abilities:

• solo lemur – this little guy lets you take the top card from your current collection and pop it at the bottom of your pile together with Mr. Leems (that’s his name. I made it so! Haha). BI’m sure you’ve worked this out but, by doing so, the card you have to beat next turn is of a lower value- yay!
• duet of lemurs – these mischief makers (Mr. Leems and Mrs. Loons) let you swap your hand with another player! So if you’ve got all low numbers and you need to be a high roller to beat your last played card, this could be the prickly power you need!
• scorpion – Stinger is triggered as soon as it’s drawn – you must discard the scorpion card together with a card from your hand (if you have one!). Ouch……or maybe not! And, yep, you guessed it; whoever has collected the most prickly pears is the winner!

Score-pions

Now, before you get too excited about being the only player with 5 cards to count at end game, you might not be a victorious Veronica!

You see, each card has a numeric value (1-13) and a number of prickly pears (1-6) printed on it. The values are important for game play – you can only play equal or higher cards to your own collections during a round, remember? But at scoring time, it’s the total number of prized pink pricklers you have that count!

On that basis, you don’t need to be first to collect 5 cards to win. You just need the most prickly pears overall! So, even if you have finished with 3 cards and others have more, don’t discount yourself yet! Because if each of those cards show 6 prickly pears (thank you lucky 13!), that’s going to beat 5 cards with a total less than 18! This isn’t a one Lemur race!

Final Thoughts

MADA was such a fun surprise! I was expecting a straight racing set collection game when I saw it. But there’s more to this pocket sized prickly pear pinching game than meets the eye!

For starters, it has a brilliant push-your-luck mechanism. Having the take a risk option available means that rounds could be much shorter or longer than planned. It can throw everybody into a new set or keep cards piling up, which could be good or bad for anyone at a given time. But whatever it is, it’s exciting!

And the fact that you can still win even if you don’t finish with 5 cards is really neat. In some games, just looking down at what you have at the end is enough to know you’re out of the running. But the grand reveal of everybody’s own prickly pear stashes is great fun and turns up some real surprises! I guess if my memory was better, I could perhaps keep a tally as the rounds go on. But I know I won’t. And I like the forehead slapping, mini-fist bump cheering moments that come with the final flips!

Yes, the special abilities are few in number. But when they come up, they can make a big difference if played right. And strategically this is where the little box pushes itself a little higher. Being able to take someone else’s deck when yours is looking sparse is a sneaky and satisfying moment. Likewise, being able to get rid of one of your cards when your hand of 3 isn’t helpful is likely to become a sting in the tail for other players!

Even the numbers you play at any time can have a big impact. You’d think that laddering up in small increments would be the way to get the longest chance to play a big number. But if other players are already topping out in the double digits then the round won’t last. So to have a chance of banking a high prickly pear plant, you might want to jump a few steps and lay a 12 or 13. At least then you can plan to end the round on your next turn and pocket that prickly beastie! Although you know what they say about best laid plans……. haha

The push your luck in MADA feels exciting and like a risk we want to take. And that always makes games with this element shine brighter. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes you have to go for it. When you can’t play or draw, being risky Rosie is the only option left. But even when you can do something else, the temptation calls. And the tension ramps up! Playing it safe each turn seems unnecessary when rounds go by so fast and another game can be squeezed in so easily. In this way it reminds me of My Gold Mine by KOSMOS – another fun filler with a risky side that is brilliant fun at any age!

For a 15/20 minute game, this feels as light but crunchy as Tucano – and for us that’s a great thing! MADA is definitely another HELVETIQ pocket game that squeezes a lot of fun under its little lid!