Game Overview: Facecards, or The Eyes Have It...Then Lost It Again

Game Overview: Facecards, or The Eyes Have It...Then Lost It Again
Board Game: Facecards
The number of games being released annually is astounding, with hundreds of new games appearing just at the SPIEL convention in Essen, Germany each year. No wonder then that some games at that show are pretty much ignored by the crowd, overlooked and rarely played despite whatever merits they have.

One such title from SPIEL '17 is Leo Colovini's Facecards, which was published by Ravensburger and which received a recommendation by the Spiel des Jahres committee in May 2018. Facecards is an atypical Colovini game in that it's a party game, but the design sticks to his principles of creating a shared play space with few rules that creates interesting interaction among the players.

In general, players in Facecards try to determine who has created which pair of faces seen on the table. You don't have to identify all the pairs, though, only one — but that pair probably won't be easy to identify because one half of it is front of a player and the other half is mixed with up to seven other cards. In general, you get one shot at identifying the pair, so look at everyone around you and try to use what you know about them to determine who would pair up from the candidates available.

And if you're playing with strangers, well, you'll get to know them a little better by the time you're counting up the points...


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