Game Overviews: Blokus Shuffle: UNO Edition and UNO: All Wild!

As I noted in a February 2021 post, the card game UNO celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021, and to mark the occasion publisher Mattel planned to release multiple versions of the game throughout the year.

One of those games was Blokus Shuffle: UNO Edition, with designer Nick Hayes blending the chaotic nature of UNO with the not-at-all-chaotic nature of Bernard Tavitian's Blokus, which Mattel purchased in 2009.

Gameplay is straightforward: After each player's first turn, in which they place one of their pieces in the corner of the gameboard like normal, they draw two cards from their personal deck. On each subsequent turn, you play a card, carry out its effects, play a piece, then refill your hand to two cards.

Here's how a finished game might look, with one of each of the eight types of cards on display:

Among other things, the cards allow you to play two pieces on a turn, play a piece directly adjacent to one or more of your pieces, remove one of your previously played pieces and return it to your pool, and play a piece as if it were the color of your choice (after which it reverts to being your color). UNO effects are present as well: skip the next player, reverse play, and draw two cards — although in this case you play one, then return the other to the bottom of your deck.

Somehow I had missed the connection when I recorded the video below, but this game mirrors the feel of Knightmare Chess, a 1994 design from Pierre Cléquin and Bruno Faidutti in which you play a game of chess while having a hand of cards that allow you to do many un-chesslike things.

That design smashes the certainty inherent in chess, and the same goes for Blokus Shuffle: UNO Edition, but the mix of cards combined with the requirement to play a card each turn doesn't lead to the same transgressive feel as Knightmare Chess. In one of my two games on a review copy from Mattel, I started with two "remove a piece" cards, so I had to remove the only piece I had played, then start again. Playing a piece as a joker at the start of the game seems incredibly strong as you can block an opponent from racing to the middle. Reversing play just seems like something to do because you'd rather not play the other card in hand.

The concept seems solid, but mostly I just wanted to play vanilla Blokus, which you can still do since the game includes all of the components needed for that.

UNO: All Wild!, also designed by Nick Hayes, contains cards that no longer feature color or number because those are restrictive elements that inhibit one from playing the game. No, instead all of the cards feature the same black border to indicate that they're wild and can be played during any time.

You might expect certain cards to be present in an UNO game, and Skip, Reverse, Draw Two, and Wild Draw Four do indeed show up — although Draw Two and Wild Draw Four are roughly the same thing since they're both wild now.

The other new cards in the deck are:

• Targeted Draw Two, which you can see on the top of the discard pile in the image above. When you play this, the opponent of your choice draws two cards, but they do not lose their turn.
• Swap Hands, which forces you to exchange your hand of cards with someone else's. If you have two of these in hand, you cannot go out with this hand since you'll have to give it away at some point.
• Double Skip, which skips the next two players. All three of my games on a purchased copy were with three players, so in this case the card is "go again". With two players, though, the effect would be nothing, which brings us to...
• Ye Olde Basic Wild Card, which makes up the majority of the deck. Essentially this is the Wild card in the standard UNO deck, but naming a color is pointless since everyone has all of the colors all the time. Rainbow hands!

Not the ideal starting hand

We played UNO: All Wild!, and all three of us were like, wait, that's it? Then my fellow players indulged me by playing twice more. Yep, that's it.

The presence of ALL! WILD! cards is meant to be exciting given that wild = powerful, but the omnipresence of wild cards neutralizes them. In that image above, I'm effectively holding a hand of blanks. You can play anything on a turn, so your turn feels less important because you're not being squeezed in any way or hoping that someone else changes colors or drops the number you need to match. UNO: All Wild! is a cake that's nothing but frosting, yet the joy of eating cake often comes from the effort involved in forking it just the right way to get a tad of frosting in each bite and saving that extra chocolate topping for the final forkful.

UNO is not a game with tons of decisions, but it does have them, and I think you can play better by paying attention to what others are playing. UNO: All Wild! feels like the 100% luck-based game that others claim UNO to be.

For more examples of gameplay and discussion of these titles, check out this video: