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The Fifth Column is a precursor of Schotten Totten played with a standard deck of cards. In the basic version each player gets a hand of six cards and two rows of nine cards each are placed on the table to start the players' columns. Two cards are discarded and the rest form a draw pile.
On a turn a player plays to one of their nine columns, claims columns if possible, and draws a card. The three-card column sets are ranked from straight flush down. A column can be claimed even if the opponent's set is incomplete if you can prove there is no way they can beat your set. If a column is completed on both sides and is tied, the player who played last loses it.
The object is to claim five columns.
Some variants are given:
Ignore straights and straight flushes.
Each player gets 15 cards at the start and never draws any more.
Don't place any cards in the columns initially, as in the later game.
- Good first impression
- Classic puzzle game feel
- Great components
- Fun puzzles
- Tentative recommendation
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Classic puzzle — This felt like more of a classic puzzle game.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This blew us away like immensely.
- It has so many different kind of puzzles and both um like both mentally but also a lot of tactile elements to it.
- They they are like if if you like puzzle games, you're going to insta back everything that they do.
- Our favorite puzzle experience.
- Of all time.
- This is one of those games where we do you have the things on the table. You look at them and you can see the connections. you might just put it away because there's so many puzzles you can do at the same time which is a great one of the great great strength of this one.
- Most of these puzzles... is in some way word based.
- So yeah, some fluency in English is very essential.