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I also love card games because the sensation of looking at a new hand of cards each round or each game is wondrously like the sensation of opening a present. In general you know what you're getting — a hand of cards, yo — but more specifically you're looking at something that will challenge you in a particular way, and you need to attack that challenge using skills that you can hone over time.
On top of all that, I also love high variability in games, specifically designs that have a solid framework around which is wrapped unexpected construction materials in previously unimagined ways to create something you would not have predicted prior to this specific game. Carl Chudyk's Innovation remains my favorite game of all time precisely because of it having a simple structure that branches in wildly different ways each playing.
No wonder then that I was primed to love Daniel Fehr's Narabi from Lifestyle Boardgames after only a two-minute explanation during Spielwarenmesse in February 2018. As Lifestyle's Olga Volkova described the game, I think that I became more and more excited until I blurted out that I had to play the game immediately. Lifestyle didn't have sample copies on hand, but they got one to me later — an unfinished version with possibly non-final artwork and cards, mind you — and I've now played it ten times to find that my early affection was not misplaced.
Stop me if you've heard this before, but Narabi is a co-operative game in which you need to place cards in numerical order. I know, I know, another one! The main difference between The Game, The Mind, and this game, however, is that Narabi places all the cards face up, with each player having three or four cards in front of them, and on a turn you need to swap one of your cards with a card held by another player — but you can swap your card only according to its rule for this game.
In more detail, at the start of play, you slide a rule card into the sleeve holding the number card, making for a new set of card/rule combinations each time you play. Sometimes you can swap a 0 for a red card, sometimes for a card with an even number, sometimes for a card held by the player on your right, and sometimes not for any other card at all. Once something you own is swapped, you can look at the rule for the new card in front of you, thereby gaining more knowledge about what's possible as the game progresses.
Narabi with fruit bowl and a side of fries
Your collective goal is to place all the cards in numerical order, whether clockwise or counter-clockwise, while ignoring all of the blanks. We've had a game in which we won in four turns, multiple games in which we failed, and many games in which we succeeded in a middling number of turns. Every game seems wildly different, and even after ten games I don't feel like I'm close to getting a handle on how to play well, which means advance mode in which you can't speak at all and in which swapbacks aren't allowed is right out for now.
Lifestyle Boardgames plans to produce a Russian edition of Narabi in mid-2018, with editions in other languages coming from other publishers at some point during the year, but Lifestyle's Alexander Peshkov was not confident of which editions would appear at which times when I last spoke with him in June 2018. Regardless of those releases, the Russian edition of Narabi should be available at SPIEL '18 in October — and if for some reason it isn't, find me. I'll be sure to have my copy in my bag, ready to put numbers in order once again whenever I get the chance...
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