MAGENTA Card Games - What ARE These?

0:00 Everyone seems to be chasing this new card game fascination. I think it started with Scout, I believe. I mean, card games have existed forever, but uh Oink had some success with Scout a few years ago now. And I think a lot of publishers saw that and wanted to chase it. So, we've seen a lot of publishers putting out little card games. We've seen like the gang, all sorts of little things. We've seen like Flip Seven. seen Trio, which was the new version of Nana, which all of these card games have, I would say, just really blow up in popularity and I think brought a focus back onto playing these card games. I know. It's exciting. And CMK has what they call the Magenta line. Why they call it the Magenta line, I'm not sure. Yeah. Nothing about this really gives any clue. No. As to why these four games are the magenta line, but I will say right off the bat, and uh the packaging, this is brilliant. the way that they have repackaged these games. Obviously, they're very clearly magenta. They stand out quite a bit and each one is just like a little sleeve that holds that box and you got that little like window. I don't know. As a person who really enjoys when a game comes with great packaging and great graphic design, they really did, I think, a good job setting this product apart. Oh yeah, this is going to jump off the shelf for sure.

1:16 Whether it's your own shelf or at retailers, I mean, this is going to stand out for sure. Some people might not like this. I've seen some comments where people said, "These boxes are way too big for these games." Cuz they are mostly just decks of cards, but they but they stand out. They look good on the shelf. And you want all four. You You can't just get one. You need the whole collection. I'm that kind of person. We are going to give you a quick overview of these. Um we haven't played any of them. Well, that's not true. We've played old versions of some of them because a lot of these games and maybe all of them have been all of them. They've existed in some form or another. They've collected them all. give them given them a new look and also I think tweaked some of the rules for some of them. But the first one is called fives and this is a trick taking game. Um you know it says in the rule book kind of like hearts or spades but it's got an interesting twist. This one's by Taki Shinszawa and in fives there's a magenta also in this one. I don't know if there's magenta in all of the games but there's I think there is back of the card has the magenta five. So, the backs of the cards also are magenta 5, which can be played. You can play cards face down as a magenta 5. There's also a suit that's magenta. And you're probably thinking, "Oh, that's probably the trump suit." You'd be wrong. Silver is the trump suit. But it's effectively a trick-taking game where you're trying to, you know, play tricks standard fashion. If you don't know that someone leads a card, then you have to follow that suit if you can. And the highest

2:47 card of that suit wins. If someone plays a trump card, the highest trump card would win the suit or win the trick. The twist here is not only the magenta fives being able to be played face down because you can play them that way. Say someone leads magenta, you can play a magenta five. Only one player per round can play a magenta 5 that way. But it also keeps hidden information because you're ditching a card face down that no one knows what you're getting rid of, which is interesting. The bigger twist, in my opinion, is the scoring. Because when you're scoring tricks, you collect the trick, but you put your card that you won with on top and you want to get as close to 25 by the end of the round as possible. If you go over 25, you get no points. Whoever's closest to 25 gets like three points. And if you get exactly 25, you get three plus a bonus point. You just play four hands and whoever has the most point wins. Yeah.

3:40 Uh but it's a really I'm looking forward to playing this thing. Uh, I'm going away this weekend and this guaranteed will get played. Well, I want to talk about mine, which is duos, because it's similar vibes of a trick- taking game, but it's not trick- at all. It is a uh partners objective claiming. I don't even know how to describe this, but it is a partners card game. Uh, this is from Johannes Schmid Koig. I I'm probably pronouncing that incorrect. Pretty good pronunciation. But you're playing with a partner and the idea is that you're trying to complete these sets and everyone is trying to work on their own sets that you have in your hand, these little objective cards that are sets and then public sets. And these sets are going to say like a consecutive run or like two of one card, two of another. And without talking to each other, you're trying to draw and pass the right cards to your opponent to complete these objectives without letting the other team know what you're trying to complete. Obviously, there's the public objective. Everybody knows if it says two of one and two of another and you know, but you don't know what you your teammates have in your hands.

4:44 There is like a public row you can draw cards from. So, if you notice that like, oh, they drew a three, they drew another three. Like, you need to be paying attention. Now, they have two threes. All they need is like two fives and you've got them and you can pass them and hopefully set your your partner up for completing these. But, it's all mind games. It's all getting into your opponent's heads. It's drafting cards that you don't need to maybe make your opponents think you're going after a set of ones. And so they're drafting these ones just to keep them away from you and you don't even need them. But then you're miscommunicating to your partner, right? But you also have to be able to talk to your partner, but you can't talk or can Right. Right. Now you're communicating through what you're giving them or what you're taking. This is one of those quiet games at the table. It's very thinky. Like this is definitely and I when I say it feels like a trick- taking game that that idea of passing cards, the right cards to your opponent feels like that element, but it's built an entire game around that idea.

5:34 Interesting. The next one uh is going to have a lot more noise at the table. It's called Figment. And this one is a variation. If you ever played the game Imagination, very similar. It's from Wolf Gang Wash, same designer. Uh you're going to be laying cards out um in a sequence. In this one, you're working cooperatively, so you can all talk about it's not one player at a time laying the card and them making the decision. The person's gonna very cooperative lay the card and everyone is going to be talking like, "Oh, it should go here. It should go here." But what it is is you're laying these cards out five in a row so that a particular color on the card goes up as it relates to the percentage of the card that it is. So that each card is going to have like four colors on it and in different uh shapes and sizes.

6:25 And when you look at a card, you're like, "Oh, I don't know how many colors." Like this one here, you can see has a lot of magenta, less green, very little blue, and I don't know if white is or it's a silver. The silver is another color. So you kind of have to put Oh, if you're doing pink, it's going to be pretty high percentage pink. Although is pink pretty close to the green. I'm not really sure. And then you reveal the cards. Um trying to get them in order, which a lot of other games do that same sort of thing. Yeah, but this is completely done based on the color of the card. And if this sounds familiar to you, yeah, it's imagination. This is or illusions. Illusions. I'm sorry. I said imagination. I said I meant illusions. We're now we're on from illusions to figment. And Figment, if you recall, is a dragon that's powered by imagination.

7:13 No, that's a different Figment. That's why I thought it was imagination because I thought it was a figment of my imagination. This is different. This is a different figment, but it is that game redone. Like we said, these were all kind of new games. That one I think might be the only one that actually changed their name because this one, Fruit Fights, uh Fruit Fight was originally Fruit Fight and this is Kitia. Uh and if you know uh Kenitia, his games are all over the place as far as like mechanically speaking. He's everything from like he's got a lot from like light card games to like, you know, Millie Fior like he's got a wide birth. This is about as simple as a card game can be, but it is a a push your luck fruit fighting game. You're trying to draft these fruits from a deck, and there's a certain number of each fruit in the game. And so, a big part of it is knowing what's out there. You're taking fruits, but if you ever get the same fruit twice, you bust. And so, you only want to you want to keep trying to get as many unique fruits as you can because if you do, you get to steal other people's fruits and add them to your pile. The only problem is the more fruits you get, the more lucrative your pile starts to get. people will steal them from you. You only score the cards that are still sitting in front of you when it gets back around to you. So, you want to like kind of maybe play some fruits that maybe people won't steal, but again, it's a push your luck game.

8:26 So, you can end up busting and having nothing. Uh there is one little cool little twist of that like you can never bust if you uh have less than three cards. So, you're guaranteed to at least like you can get to your third card even if they're all three the same and say I'm just going to stop here. So, it is got, you know, a little bit of uh mitigation, but it is at its core just a complete like push your luck. This is like one of those rockus party games where everybody's going to be yelling at each other. This one sounds like the most fun I would say in terms of most interactive for sure. Like you're literally stealing and you're going to have those moments of like I can't I had so many bananas and now they're all gone and like you know especially when you play with the full player count. So yeah, that's that's fruit fight here. Give me that one. I'm going to order these. I'm going to see what you if you agree. Oh no. What are we ordering that? Here's the order in which I think I will like these. I'm going to like fives the best, then fruit fight, then duos, then figment. I think you might really like duos actually better than fruit fight.

9:21 Yeah, I think you might. So, you think it's like this? What do Is that what you think? Is this the order you put them? Fives is definitely the one that appeals to me most as more of like a standard trick taker. And I liked illusion, but I have a really really hard time with that game already. I do too. Uh, and I have a hard time with F because I'm like staying. I'm like at a certain point my eyes cross and my brain just goes away. Illusion or Yeah, Figment is one of those games where you you'll play it once and you're like that was fun. I don't know that Figment is the kind of game that people will keep playing all night, right? It doesn't have that same like the mind where you get to the end, you're like again. Let's do it again. It's like okay, I got it. We just aren't good at looking at the percentages, which I do wonder if this I I if this line is successful, I would love to see them bring keep continue doing this magenta series just because you want a whole shelf in your I think that's awesome. Magenta or magenta in a different color. Oh, that'd be kind of cool, too. Like sets of I'm sure they're already I'm a sucker for packaged sets of games. I really am. Yes, we know you are. Anyway, that is the magenta line from CMK. If you have any questions about these or if you have an order, if you've played these, cuz these have been out for a minute. Um, if you've played these or had a chance to play any of them, let us know in the comments below what order you think, which one you think is the best. If you think one of them is amazing, or if you think one of them is just awful, let us know in the comments below. Until next time though, make sure everyone has fun at the table, and we'll see you then.