Monday, August 13, 2012

Review: Democrazy

Democrazy is a social card game all about changing the rules as you go.  Players start with 6 randomly selected colored tokens and two sets of cards, voting cards (Yes, No, and a one use trump card) and law cards.  On their turn, a player draws another law card from the deck and chooses either that law or another from their hand that all the players will vote to either pass or fail.  If it passes, then starting on the next turn, players must follow whatever it says on it.

Some of the laws that may be put in effect, change the point values of the tokens (e.g. all blue tokens are worth 3 points).  Some rules will give players bonus points based on something about them (e.g. all players with blue eyes get 5 points).  Some rules complicate the game (e.g. everyone who voted for a law that passed or against a law that was rejected draws a token).  Once the End Game law card is drawn from the deck or all the tokens from the bag are gone, the game ends and the player with the most points following the current rules wins.

This is a very interesting game of reading other players (which I'm bad at) and trying to either convince or predict how everyone else will vote.  This is especially true when there is a law in effect that rewards or punishes you based on how your suggested law fared.  The game gets even crazier to follow than Fluxx does, but you always have some say in how crazy the game can get.  If you feel you can't win the vote, you may play your trump card to force it a specific way (Yes, No, or opposite of how the vote goes depending on what trump card you were dealt).  Usually you only get one of those cards per game, but there are laws to change that.  Also, if two players play trump cards on the same turn, they cancel each other out, so those players not only wasted their vote, but also lost their trump cards.

This game is a lot of fun if you've got a bigger group (6-8 people) who can all either track complicated rule sets or help each other do so.  If any player gets easily lost or confused, this game would not be very much fun.  If you fulfill those requirements, then this game is worth the $20 purchase price.

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