SMÄK Kickstarter Preview

The cute/quirky factor in games is always hit and miss. Exploding kittens got it about right but I’ve seen plenty of games either go too cutesy and not appeal to a large audience, or the art doesn't quite sit right. Thankfully this isn’t a mistake SMÄK makes, while the unicorns certainly hit hard (in more ways than one), they work very well. The quality of their art and their connection to the game mechanics is really nice.

So what am I talking about? Well SMÄK of course. It’s a new card game that’s just launched on kickstarter. It features unicorns brutally murdering one another (or not, there is a just as good family friendly version available, I personally love the unicorn frozen in an ice cube). The basic premise isn’t too different from games like Uno which most of us will know well. You are trying to get rid of all the cards in your hand and the first one to do so wins. Careful though, other players can throw +2’s at you to make you pick up more cards, but you could continue that to the next player by playing your own +2, making it +4. See why it’s like Uno?

It has a few tricks up its sleeve though, like the card that acts like any other card of your choice, or the card that’s basically an arcade claw machine that lets you pick a card from the discard pile and immediately play it. The main mechanic though is the SMÄK cards. You’ll be wanting to play these after a few people have added +2’s and +3’s to the pile. You really don’t want to take the pickup penalty so instead you SMÄK. This triggers a dice battle where you roll custom dice looking for the unicorn symbol. You keep rolling together until you get it, but the last person to get the symbol takes the penalty.