This is one of the best card games I’ve ever played

0:00 let's talk about one of the best card games I've ever played welcome to brains on games I'm Dr Brian McDonald and today we are going to talk about one of the best card games I've ever played certainly one of the best games I've played this year this is a game that that was just sent out to Kickstarter backers uh over the last few months a game called Mory by all play this is a trick-taking game and it's so good I can't wait to tell you all about it Mory is a game for between three and five players you can't play this with two games work with kids aged 11 and up and it only takes about half an hour to play round of Mory let's take a deeper look at Mory by allplay myy is a light trick-taking game but the scoring is complex enough that there's some strategy involved and we did sometimes I played this a few times with two different group groups of people several times with two different groups of people we really like this game so I played it a bunch of times with two different groups it does take some time to figure out what are the best strategies to win you are trying to win this game by being the player who has the most points at the end of the game and this is another one of those allplay games that came with a dry erase marker and a wipe off board to keep track of your points rather than using a pad of paper you where you have to find a pen or a pencil or something you've got a dry erase marker that came in the box

1:30 and a little board like this one one of the ways that you're going to earn points or lose points every game is by winning tricks that have these symbols on them so you will gain a point for each card that you have at the end of the round that has a leaf on it for each Leaf you get a point so this is worth two points but you lose uh a point for each skull that you wind up with so the lower numbered cards the lower ranked cards the ones that are harder to win a hand with have more leaves on them but the higher cards have skulls so if you play a skull you might win the hand but you're going to lose that one point potentially two points because when you're playing with Higher Play counts the cards go from zero to 10 and the 10 cards have two skulls on them instead of one at the start of the game you're going to roll 10 dice you place them on the board here like this because whenever you win a hand whenever you win a trick you're going to get to draft one of these Dice from the board so that's very important and and these can be really helpful as you play through the game you're going to deal out nine cards to each player and they also get two of these twig cards these are rot cards uh they've got Twigs that are tied up like an X these are super important for points in this game the player who finishes the round with the most of these and not just cards that they've won but also cards in their hand so if they don't play them they're stuck with these cards in their hand too and those count towards your points as well if you've got the most of these at the end of the Round And the round ends when the last die is taken and you've got the

3:00 most you're going to lose a point for each of these rot cards that you're stuck with if you have the second most rot cards though you gain a point for each of those cards so you're trying to be the one who finishes the round with the second most not the most the second most of these and the players who have less than that are not going to get gain or lose any points so if in the case of a tie if you're tied for the most both players lose all of those points if you're tied for the second most both players are going to gain all of those points but this is a game where really these X's are flying around the table and you're trying to keep track of who still has them in their hand Mory is a must follow trick Taker and I did a video a while back that had definitions about all of these trick taking terms and I'll link to it somewhere around here you'll probably see it at the top of the screen somewhere but a must follow trick taker means that if you've got a card in your hand of the suit that's been led the first suit that's played into the trick you have to play that card but Mory does make it tricky because there are some cards that break that rule so the X's will allow you to uh break that must follow rule if you play a rot card into a trick it cannot win so you're not going to win that hand somebody else is going to win it but that's going to give them one of these cards which could potentially lose them a lot of points or maybe gain them points when the round is all done the highest ranked card of the lead suit is going to be the winner unless a trump card is plate a trump suit uh and the

4:31 trumps are kind of ranked in almost like a rock paper scissors kind of a style so if the lead card is green then a purple will trumpet it goes around the circle like this and you've got this convenient pad that's a just a reminder for everybody that red trumps purple and yellow trumps red and it just goes around the circle and like I said the X's are always going to lose so if these are the three currs that are played into the suit if green is lad maybe I played a three uh and someone else played purple which is Trump uh and then the third player just played whatever green card that they had left because it is a must follow trick taker well then the person who played this purple is going to win because it is the Trump suit they're going to gain a total of three points because you've got four leaves on here plus there's a skull that subtracts those points by one so you've got a total of three points here each time you win a hand you're going to draft one of those Dice and the dice act as cards now they don't have ranks on them just a suit but you can play that as a card it's sort of it's going to be lower than a zero so remember if you're playing with lar a larger number of players there're going to be some zero cards but a a purple zero is going to beat my purple die the other tricky thing though about these dice is that you can use them to break the must follow rules so if green has been LED maybe I can play this in order to because purple trumps green maybe I can play this die in order to win that hand but often the dice are going to lose the hand and really you

6:03 might be playing those dice in order to avoid giving up a card that has lots of leaves on it that's going to earn you some points play continues until the last die has been drafted from the die board and then that's the the end of that round you're going to count up the leaves and skulls on the cards that you've won in each trick as well as the cards in your hand then you're going to count up the x's in your hand that you've w one in the tricks and the ones that you haven't played that you maybe drafted earlier in the game and then the next round begins you deal you roll the dice over again you deal out those nine cards and the two x's you start each round with those two x's and then you just continue until you've played a number of rounds equal to the number of players what skills are you working on though when you play a game like Mor well like I said earlier I did do a video about trick taking games and so in general these are games games where you are exercising those memory skills because you're counting cards you have to remember which cards have been played in order to choose the best card that you're going to play to get the outcome that you want but Mory is a special one because of the dice and cards that break the must follow Rule and the way that those X's work when you're counting up scoring so the there's a lot of kind of you're not just counting cards and remembering what's been played you're also trying really to plan ahead you're

7:33 you're you're budgeting your cards there's more hand management I think in in a game of Mory than there is in you some other trick-taking games that I've played and and those X's really do amp up this the strategy and the fun and the tension as you're playing through as well as the fact that you can break the must follow rules with the dice so you've got memory for card counting and then you've got those executive functioning skills the skills and behaviors that you need to work towards a goal that includes planning ahead that includes budgeting those cards and trying to hang on to the ones that are going to be worth a lot of points or trying to force other players into playing those cards that are worth a lot of points so you've you've got a good combination of abilities here that you're working on Final thoughts about Mory well this is a game where you've got beautiful looking currents now the artwork is the same in the background of each suit so whether you're playing a one or a five if it's the red roses it's going to have the same picture on it but these are great looking cards with skulls and flowers Mori is a word that means death but it's also a word I think in Japanese it means Forest so you you've got the flowers and you've got the skulls on all of those cards the deluxe components so I do like the artwork the dice are nice uh they're they're a nice weight and of course they've got the suit uh logo on them which I like the the deluxe components uh and I talked about the the last allplay game I talked about was lunar

9:04 and it had all of those metal pieces that were indicating who was the lead player and and which suit was Trump uh the deluxe components in this one are wooden tokens with x's on them and this is just to help you keep track of who has the most rot cards you know as you win a if you win a couple of rot cards in a hand you're going to take a couple of these and then you've got them stacked up in front of you it just makes it easier at a glance certainly not a necessary component but this is the deluxe edition uh that just makes it a little bit quicker than trying to count all the cards that are laying flat on the table the rule breaking of the dice and the rot cards really does amp things up it makes every turn tense and interesting you never know is somebody going to spend one of their dice are they going to save them for later uh because they want they they don't want to take any extra X's uh if you lead with an X the other player players can also play a rot card and then if everybody plays a rot card the person who led is going to wind up with all of them and that happened a bunch of times in the games that we played you know a player would think oh I think those other players have spent their their rot card so I'm not going to get stuck with this but sometimes you wound up grabbing that anyway so uh really really interesting tradeoff in terms of the points and scoring you've got the high cards that make it easy to win a hand but they've got skulls on them you've got the lower card s that you're trying to get the other players to give you but you might want to hang on to them the fact that you're counting points that

10:35 are still in your hand at the end of the round because you've got these dice that you're spending instead of cards they oh this game it's just so interesting uh and as I said it's tense and you'll sit and stare at your cards and wonder oh should I play should I play my ax now should I save it for later if I play this then that's oh my gosh what an interesting interesting game uh are there downsides well a couple I do think that four and five players is better than three now I played it with multiple groups but only at a three-player count I just couldn't get four people together all at the same time to play this one uh so I I think with four it would be really good just because you've got the higher numbered cards you've got more skulls out there with the the higher numbers and it makes it a little bit harder to keep track of where those xes are going it it is such an interesting game even with three but I think with four even better so a higher play count is better that was tough for me to to organize I I wasn't it's hard enough sometimes for me to get three people to play a game let alone four so that's certainly a downside the other thing I would say is a downside with this game really and and as I said at the beginning this is one of the best card games I've played in ages it's definitely one I think it's one of my top five trick takers I've ever played um but even though I do really like the card art on all of the main cards in the game boy those X cards you really don't want to get them they're so boring and there's you know these are the cards

12:05 that aren't very nice all the other cards are goodlooking the deluxe components I mean they're they're made out of wood and they're stamped with the X logo but they're kind of light and they're not as interesting I would say artwise or or even weightwise as the other components in the game or as the component on in lunar that we talked about before it makes sense though if we're talking about these as rot tokens and we're talking about a forest you want them to be made out of wood uh but they're kind of light and there's there's not a lot to them and the X The Twig logo just isn't very pretty but those are minor knocks I think on a game that is just fantastic we had so much fun playing this one it comes in that little tiny box so it's easy to Lug around it came with the wipe off board and the dry erase markers so you don't have to look for a pad and pencil you don't need those you've got anyway what a great game we just had so much fun playing it so uh allplay has has really made something special I think this is a game that's gotten pulled out a few times already when people come over even though I'd already played it and kind of made my notes for the video uh I'm still playing this one and it's going to continue to get pulled out so one of my favorite trick takers I definitely would recommend it to anyone who likes these kinds of games it might even win over folks who aren't super enthusiastic about trick takers but who like other kinds of strategic card games um what a

13:37 good time we had playing this one if you have any comments or questions about Mory or brains on games if you want to set up a a Meetup uh at breakout in merch that can definitely be arranged leave a comment in the comment section below the video of course you can email me at Brian brains on.cafe.com that's where future episodes will go the previous ones are up there already brains on games is the X handle and the Facebook page and the Instagram feed so we're all over the place and if you enjoyed this video and you want to be notified of future ones you can head on over to YouTube and click that subscribe button thanks for joining me and hopefully I'll see you next time