The Magic Shop Review: Is This Your Card?

0:15 Hey there everybody. It's Mike Delisio and today I'm going to be talking about a game called The Magic Shop. This is a trick-taking game coming from a publisher Jupiter's Club that is themed around well a magic shop. Now, uh, how much theme is actually there? Well, not a whole lot, but that's okay. It's a trick-taking game. Let's head on over to the table. I'll show you how this particular trick-taking game handles the genre, and then we'll come back here and I will let you know what I think. Remember DVDs? They were a physical form of media on which you could watch films. They also came in cases like this. But in this case, this is no DVD. This is the Magic Shop, a trick-taking game from Jupiter's Club, a publisher based in Japan. They have frequently used odd packaging for their games. So, here you see the components inside. I'll talk about these in a bit more detail. This can double as either a central board or background music if you'd like to listen to it while you're playing your game. I have never listened to the background music. I can't review that. I'm so sorry. Up here, you've got the stage disc, which has all five of the suits represented along with their special powers. You've got some thirst tokens here that I'll talk about in a little bit. And you also have a power token which can flip from an open eye to a closed eye. I'll talk about all that in a moment. The deck is made up of 45

1:48 cards, five suits numbered from 0 to eight. That's in a four to five player game. In a three-player game, you actually remove the zeros and the eights from all the suits, and then you play from the remaining deck of cards. Okay, let's assume this is a four-player game. Every player is going to get one of these victory point cards that they will take this little clip and they'll start it on the zero. As you gain points throughout the game, you'll just move this little clip along to reflect the number of points that you have. In a four-player game, everyone is dealt a hand of 10 cards. In this game, players are going to be looking at their hands and then they're going to be determining what they think. They're going to be bidding for what they think is the maximum number of tricks that they're going to win in that round. Ideally, they want to get the number exactly right. However, it's mostly important that they don't go over the number that they bid. So, after looking at your hand, you can get a sense of how many you think you're going to win based upon that thinking, okay, I'm doing pretty good in this suit. Um, it's a game that has Trump, but that trump will change throughout the game. So, right now, red is Trump at the start. They got three trump cards. Maybe they feel comfortable in saying that they're going to win three. There we go. Maybe they feel comfortable in saying that they're not going to win more than three tricks in this round. Although, they've got some bigger ones. They're going to stick with three as their bid. When you bid, you're going to be playing a card uh either

3:20 face up or face down to let everybody else know how many tricks you think you're going to win. So, if you play a card face up from your hand, you would just choose the number that represents your bid. So, I was saying three. I have one three here. Now, I could take that card and I can play it just face up uh underneath so that everyone knows my bid is three. The other thing is on the back of all of the cards that say zero on one side and three on the other. So, it's a way for you maybe to get rid of a card that you don't want to uh have in your hand. You could play it face down. I could even choose to take this card instead of playing it face up. Whoa, that was pretty fancy. Magic. I can play it face down like that. And it's effectively doing the same thing. Every player would then bid in the same way, either face up or face down. Okay. So, once everyone has made their bids and have them showing visible to the entire table, the play is going to begin.

4:17 Choose a starting player randomly or as it says here, I think the last player that has seen a magic trick. However you want to do it, the starting player that leads into the trick can play any card that they want in their hand. Okay. So, let's say for uh just for the purposes of this example that uh this player plays out the yellow suit and they play a one. This is what's known as a mustfollow trick-taking game, which means that if you've got a card of that suit in your hand, you must play it. So in this case, they only have one of that suit, but they have to play it. They play the six. Coming to this player, they're looking through their hands. They've got a bunch of different cards. They could choose to either win or lose this trick, but they bid four. So it's very likely they would play the card that they feel that they're very likely to win with, remembering that there is a Trump suit, but that can only be played if you don't have a card of that suit.

5:08 Well, what do you know? What do you know? This player doesn't have any cards of that lead suit. Now, they could choose to play any card they want. And if they played any card other than red, they would lose because the winner of the trick will be the highest card of the lead suit unless Trump is played. Let's say that they want this to be one of their three tricks that they win. So, they go ahead and they play the red six. That is Trump. They now are the winner of this trick. But before that gets evaluated, one of the things that triggers here is that these thirst tokens are given to the first player to play trump into a trick. That could even be the lead player. In this case, this player here was the first player to play a trump into the trick. So, they're going to take one of these thirds tokens and they're going to place it on top of their excuse me, wrong player. They're going to place it on top of their bid card. This is not necessarily a penalty for that player, but it is a potential bonus for other players in the game. The winner of a trick is now going to have to choose a magic power that is based upon a suit that was played in the trick. In this case, there were two different suits that were played. You have this suit and you have this suit.

6:19 Now, if a player chooses the power of the card they won with, the suit that they won with, they can just do that without any type of additional action. However, if this player chooses that they would rather use one of the other suits, in this case there's only one, they would have to take a thirst token to do it. But this player is happy to utilize the power of the card they played, which in this case is move the trump marker one space either um clockwise or counterclockwise. Maybe they choose to change trump now to this suit. They take these cards, they're going to place them near their uh pile or near their card so that they can keep track of the number of suits they won. And now this player is going to lead out into the next trick knowing that now this suit is the Trump trick. And so that's going to be essentially how it works. You're going to be playing uh a mustfollow trick taking game. Trump will likely move around. Let's talk a little bit about the other powers here. If this power is chosen at the end of a trick, every player will choose one card in their hand and they will pass it clockwise to the player in that direction. This says accumulate this trick. That means that the trick uh will not be given to the player that won the trick right away. Instead, it will be placed off to the side until a different power is is triggered and then whoever would win the trick would take all the tricks that had accumulated. This is to flip the power token. What that does is

7:51 it flips this power token in the middle to the closed eye. Whenever it is the closed eye, it will be the smallest card of the lead suit or of Trump will win instead of the highest card. And then here, replacing the bid card is exactly what it says. You'll be changing out the bid card that you had played at the beginning of the round. Now, when you do that, you have to play it face up. You could not play it face down when the uh this power is being uh utilized. The round is going to end when all the cards in players hands have been played through uh through that last trick. And then each player is going to compare the number of tricks they won this round with their bid. And they're going to score some victory points depending upon a couple of different factors. If you won fewer than the number of tricks you bid, it's not terrible. You're just going to get one point for every bid that you won. If you match the bid perfectly, your magic power resonates with the magic shop. In addition to the VPs that you uh will get from your winning tricks, you're also going to score additional VPs that are equal to the number of thirst tokens that are held by every other player. And so has that's how this bonus can come in. If you hit your bid perfectly, you get one point per uh trick you won plus whatever thirst tokens have accumulated on other players bid cards. If however you win more tricks than you bid, you are shut out completely. You get no victory points that round. At the end of the round, you shuffle the cards and red deal. And then after three rounds, the

9:23 player with the most victory points is going to be the winner of the magic shop. Let's head back and I'll let you know what I think. Okay. So, there you have the magic shop. And I guess the first thing that I'm going to talk about uh is the production. So, this is a very indie uh publication. I I I get the impression that there was not a huge print run on this, but there are some very, you know, um impressive parts of this production. This nice little metal crown for the the Trump marker is unnecessary, but very nice. The little disc. Now, those are stickers, but that's perfectly fine.

10:12 They even gave you some extra stickers in case maybe you didn't do such a great job the first time. The little uh CD here is a fun kind of twist. You don't need it obviously because they also suggest that you can play the music on here, although as I said at the beginning, I have never played the music. Um, but be that as it may, it's nice. Um, the card quality is fine. It's not going to be anything that is like premium. I would not call these premium cards. They're a bit thin. Um, but perfectly fine. The art I really like. It has kind of this, you know, what you would expect from this kind of curio. Um, kind of a little bit mysterious type of a thing. Now you See Me, the prestige, movies like that. that has a little bit of that touch to it. Um, yeah. So, I really like the look of the game. It It is distinctive and um I appreciate it for that. But this is mostly about the game because the theme is strictly aesthetic in this game. Um, the game is very interesting. So, you know, I play a lot of trick-taking games. I review a lot of trick- taking games and um you you start to see certain things that are like, okay, yeah, this is kind of an interesting thing, but I've seen it in a few other games. Um the magic shop does some things that are pretty unique. Now, I like the fact that its basic structure is still a mustfollow trick-T game because that's one that most people that have played a trick-taking game are

11:43 familiar with. Uh it's not that aspect of it is pretty much standard. you know, you have to follow with whatever the lead suit was if you can, otherwise you can play off suit, whether that's Trump or it's not. I like that this has a bidding system, and a lot of trick takers also have a bidding system. Some people don't like bidding for the number of tricks they have because they feel this intense pressure at the beginning of the round. What is nice about this one is that you've got several ways to kind of deal with that. Um, I like that you can play any number in your hand face up or face down um to to determine the number of bids. Now, there will be some times, it is certainly possible that there's a number of bids that you want to bid, but you don't have a card of that value, and that's a little bit of a bummer. I wish there was something that could kind of be uh done for that.

12:35 But you do have the opportunity to replace your bid card and and maybe several times throughout the game. You also might be forced to change a bid card that you don't really want to. And that can be a little bit there's a little element of chaos there uh that you have to account for and and so if you don't like some element of chaos or random randomness in your trick- taking games, you should be aware of that. It doesn't bother me. I actually think it's kind of fun in this particular game because it's kind of baked into the design. You you you've got all of these things that can happen. You can have, you know, high cards winning tricks, which is the standard. Do you have low cards winning tricks potentially? You've seen that in other or I've seen that in other trick- taking games, but it's nice that it can happen and it can be fluid throughout the game. The changing of Trump, again, I've seen that before where you can have, you know, Trump that will change throughout the game, but it's done pretty elegantly here. I really like this system of any Trump or any, excuse me, any suit that was played into a particular trick could trigger that magic power. If it's the one of the suit that you played as as the winner of the trick, nothing happens other than you activate that magic power. However, there are going to be times you really want to use one of the other powers that are represented in that trick and so you take a thirst token to do it. I also really really like that thirst token system because what it does is it does not directly penalize a player for winning a trick. And and I think that

14:05 that would feel kind of bad if when when winning a trick, you're doing something something that is directly taking points away from you, but it is potentially giving a bonus to other players. So, you know, that effectively could be taking a point away from you, but it's not for sure. And it just has a different psychological effect uh on players, I've I have found, and it has for me for sure. So, I really like that system a lot. I like that it's three rounds. It's not number of rounds per players because I feel like it would be too long uh after if you went beyond three rounds. So, if you were playing with four or five players and went four or five rounds, I feel like it would go way too long. And so, three rounds feels good at all player counts. I have played at all player counts. I enjoy all player counts. Three, four, and five. The only difference, as I mentioned in the overview, is that in a three-player game, you get rid of the zeros and the eights of all five suits. Everything works fine. Otherwise, it still feels the exact same way. So, a really cool game, some neat twists. Uh, I'm coming in at an 8 out of 10. The reason why I'm not going above that is that there is a fair amount of chaos that happens within the game. And so, certain players are going to bounce off of that because, you know, there are some trick- players that want perfect information. You definitely don't uh really have that perfect information here. Um, and you know, it's going to be a little bit lacking in some of the uh production, although overall I

15:35 think it's a fine production. So, an eight out of 10. A really unique trick-taking card game, The Magic Shop. All right, that's going to do it for me. This is Mike Delisio, and I'll see you on the next one. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this video. So, if you like this review or whatever you just watched, wasn't it amazing? Uh, check out our channel, Dice Tower. We have all kinds of things. We review games, we do top 10s, we play games live. It's all about board games, but especially the people who play them. Check out Dice Tower YouTube channel.