Have you heard of Grandpa Beck’s games? We LOVE every one we’ve played, and we really love how each character in his games represents a person in his family. The illustrations are so fun and I love how their whole family is involved in making these amazing games.
As an aside, Skull King is a favorite of my entire extended family. Even my dad will play! When we get together, there are many, many, many rounds of Yo-Ho-Ho-ing and lots of Aaaargh-ing. It’s great.
But back to this game… Antiquity Quest, like Skull King, is a fresh innovation of an old standard. Skull King is a brilliant expansion of hearts, and Antiquity Quest is the superior version of Canasta or Hand and Foot. I’ve played a lot of Hand and Foot in my married life (it’s a favorite of my in-laws) and Antiquity Quest is SO much better.
First of all, it’s every man for himself. I don’t love playing teams. :)
Second, you can really wreck other player’s plans, an essential element to any game worth playing repeatedly.
Third, the artwork and theme of the game is fabulous. Treasure, ancient artifacts… the cards are interesting, colorful, and have plenty of mind-fodder to expand play into an entire Antiquities homeschool unit study.
Like Canasta/Hand in Foot, each player has their first hand of cards and a second cache of cards to be used after the first hand is completely played or discarded. Sets are collected and laid down.
- PERFECT collections, made of a single suit with no duplicate cards, are worth the most points
- STANDARD collections, made of a single suit WITH duplicate cards are worth fewer points
- MIXED collections, made of a combination of treasure and antiquity cards, are worth the least points
The wrench is that any player can add cards to ANY collection on the table, which means your perfect collection could become mixed at the hand of your opponent. NOOOOOOO!
There are a few other cards with special abilities that add to the fun, and the round ends when the first player has used up all cards in the initial hand and the secondary cache of cards. The winner is the player with the most points at the end of 3 rounds.
It just so happens that we’re in the middle of studying Egypt, and I love finding games to go with our studies. A loose connection is still a connection, and it feeds the mind with ideas. We’ve enjoyed learning more about these ancient artifacts when we’re not collecting and sabotaging each other in the game… :)
