Quao – The Ultimate Dictatorship Game
Tonight was my first Friday night back at school, and I spent it with the guys I'm now living with playing various games I brought back from the summer. I had intended to do a monthly game review this summer, which never happened, so I'll start now.
Game: Quao - The Ultimate Dictatorship Game
Publisher: Wiggity Bang Games, LLC
Players: 3-6 (We had 4)
Length: About half an hour - a full hour, if I recall correctly
Price: $9.95, extremely cheap for this good of a game
Quick Synopsis: This game is what would happen if World War II (the war) met up with Bullshit (the game) or President, udder (heh heh) chaos. Bullshit is a game where you have to get rid of all your cards (aka a Shedding game) without being called out for lying. President is a game where you have to get rid of all your cards, and some players are in a more advantageous position than others. World War II was a crazy time with people making weird rules, alliances, and generally just running amok if they could. In Quao there's one person who knows the special rules (a made up example could be 'No one can say Rumpelstiltskin'), and the rest just know certain rules/cards in play (such as 'At the start of every turn you must make an animal sound and say what it eats). If either type of rule is violated, Quao makes that offender draw a card. The goal is to get rid of your whole hand, whoever does becomes Quao next round. A game consists of 5 rounds, the winner of the 5th wins the game, of course by that time there's 4 Quao rules, and perhaps 10 other special rules in play, so it gets crazy.
Thoughts: This was a really fun game once you got past the 'these rules don't make any sense' aspect of the first 5 minutes. Thankfully it appears they anticipated that period, and included a 'Sample Game' section in the rules that gives you the guts to jump in and figure out that the rules aren't that bad. We ended up getting really paranoid about what the Quao rules where (none of us looked at them ahead of time) and at least I guessed at it and was completely off base. This led to everyone else knowing one major one except for me, and me going a tad bit crazy trying not to break it... of course I ended up breaking it more in the process. That paranoia really captures the idea of a dictatorship, I was scared for my card's life! In the end this becomes an amazing beginner's game, knowing the cards only makes it not fun for the regular players, the newbies can pick it up quickly (it took us a whole 1 round to get going, 1/5 of a game and we were playing like pros) and it'll all be new and funny to them.
Complaints: I want to see a booster pack. By the end of our third game we knew most of the regular rule cards, and about 4 major Quao rules, just with normal turn over of Quao, not looking through them. Barring that, just sell me a deck of blank cards and I'll write them myself (Draw a card!). I feel like 40-50 more white cards, and a nice stack of 25-30 rule cards would do the trick. This game is too good to have me get tired of it quickly so get me more cards!
Overall (Completely arbitrary and non-comparable) Rating: Extremely fun, just too dang short!
