Zirkus Flohcati Flea Circus is a cute filler from Reiner Knizia which has enjoyed a surprising amount of popularity. The [gasp] superfluous theme dresses up a light card game with virtually no setup time and a ten minute duration.The deck consists of ten colors numbered 07 and a handful of action cards. A player’s turn consists of flipping any number of cards even zero from the deck one by one, placing them into a pool. A player can stop at any time and take any card from the pool, ending his turn. The danger in flipping is that if a card’s color matches that of another card in the pool, it gets discarded and the flipper’s turn ends without anything to show for it. The game’s main mechanic of interest is therefore of the pressyourluck variety.If an action card comes up the player follows its instructions and ends his turn. These come in three flavors take a random card from an opponent‘s hand, have an opponent give you a card of his choice from his hand, or flip cards until a duplicate color appears and then take a card from the pool.Players can meld sets of three cards of the same value. Each set scores ten points regardless of their face value. The game ends when the deck runs out or when any player reveals a hand containing at least one card of each color earning a ten point bonus. Players score the face value of the highest card of each color in their hand cards in melds are ignored here. Any other cards are worthless.Zeroes through threes are therefore most valuable in melds. Sets of higher values score more separately, but might be melded if a player had even higher cards of the same colors since otherwise the lower cards score nothing.Zirkus Flohcati has an enormous random factor. I’ve been in games where the player to my left kept drawing sevens while I kept drawing duplicates. The risk can be mitigated by paying attention to the probabilities, which are simple enough that even kids should be able to grasp them. It’s hard to resist the lure of flipping more cards, however, even when it’d be wiser to suck up a zero and plan to collect more later for a meld. Whether or not to meld those lower cards can be an interesting decision, as it takes you farther from the complete set of ten colors that ends the game. A sudden end can catch opponents with worthless partial sets of duplicated colors still in their hands, robbing them of points they’d have earned if they’d finished the melds.

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