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Why First? has a simple concept: Each round, players (sort of) race on a track and whoever comes in second in that race scores points. After five races, whoever has the secondmost points wins.
This concept drives everything in the game. You want to move ahead of the pack in order to score points, but you need to ensure that exactly one other person moves more. (In the event of a tie for second, all tied players score points.) You want to score in order to win, but you need exactly one other person to score more. How are you going to make that happen?
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What's with the lack of indexing on all four corners? Boo!
At the start of each round, each player receives a hand of five cards from a deck that contains cards numbered -4 to -1 and +1 to +5, with 20 of the 32 cards being in the ±1 and ±2 range. Everyone chooses one card from their hand, then you have a countdown (3...2...1...Go!), and everyone slams their card down in front of whoever they want, including themselves. Players then reveal all the cards in front of themselves, sum those values, and move their pawn forward or backward the appropriate number of spaces. Players do this four times, then their fifth card in hand applies only to their own pawn.
You then see whoever scores for the round, record those points, reset the cards and pawns on the game board, then do it again for four more rounds to see who wins.
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Let's return to my question from earlier: "How are you going to make that happen?" Well, you might not. In case you couldn't tell from the description above, Why First? is a romp and not a game of skillful card management. You have no idea who might play which cards or who they'll play them in front of. Player position can change quickly, leaving you sorry that you played what and where you did even though it made perfect sense at the time.
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I've played three times on a press copy from Pegasus (with AEG planning to release this version of the game in the U.S. in Sept. 2015), once each with two, four and six players. The two-player game uses an imaginary third player who has only four cards each round and plays only on himself, and it works far better than I expected it would, with you having the greatest control of any player count since so few players are on the track to begin with!
The fun thing about the gameplay each round, as well as the method for determining a winner, is that Pegasus' Why First? isn't really a race game at all because everything is relative to everything else. Is it good to be on the 5 on the track after the first set of cards have been played? Maybe! Is it good to score 5 points in the first round? Maybe! You don't know because it depends on what everyone else is doing.
As an example, my son Traver had played in the four-player game, and he requested Why First? at a later game night when we had six. Manny scored 5 points in the first round, tying everyone else for the win, then I scored 7 in the second round, putting Manny in the lead and transforming my goal into getting Manny some more points while he wanted to stay where he was and everyone else wanted to get on the board. After the fourth round, Traver had 6 points and was primed to win as long as he didn't score; I needed to push him ahead of me, while everyone else wanted to score exactly enough points to tie him with 6. (Well, if Traver scored -1 or fewer points, Manny would win, but I've seen negative points in only one race of 15 so far.) Everyone was still in the game in that final round, hope sticking around until the end, the window of opportunity squeezing ever smaller with each card played until in the end only one player remained on top — well, second from top, but victorious all the same.
Traver drew awards for himself after winning
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