SPIEL '17 Preview: Origami, or Eric Folds Five Families

I love card games. I'd be fine with never playing a board game again as long as I had card games available to me. Each time you pick up a hand of cards, it's like opening a present. You have some idea of what might be inside, but the details of the thing are what's important. Which cards do you have in hand this time? What don't you have? What's possible?! The more that you play a card game, the better you get, and as your knowledge of the game increases, you start playing the same hand three times: once when you first look at the cards and imagine what could happen, again when you're actually playing, and a third time when you're assessing how things went and what you might have done instead.

I'm not even close to that level of understanding with Christian Giove's Origami, which dV Giochi will debut at SPIEL '17 in October. I've played three times on a rough preproduction copy from dV Giochi, each time with three players, and I still haven't even seen all the cards in the game.

Origami is for 2-4 players, and the game includes five families of animals with each family being a different color. To set up the game, choose 2-4 families — with that number matching the number of players — shuffle them, then deal each player face-up cards until they have ten or more folds on their visible cards. "Folds" are the currency in the game, and one of the few nods in the game toward the "Origami" name, the other being the origami-like animal images on the cards.

Once everyone takes their cards in hand, you lay out four cards in a face-up market, then start taking turns. On a turn you can:

• Draw cards from the market that sum up to at most four folds. Refill the market to four cards, then add these cards to your hand, discarding at the end of your turn if you have more than eight cards.

• Spend cards from your hand to pay (exactly!) the cost of a single card in your hand. If a card costs 6, for example, you must discard cards that feature exactly six folds. Place this card on one of two collections in front of you, making sure that each collection is no more than one card larger or smaller than the other collection.

• Use the special effect of an animal card on top of one of your collections.

That's it! Rinse and repeat until you've gone through the entire deck twice, shuffling discards as needed to create a new deck, which you will need to do since after the deck runs out a second time, you still complete the current round, then each player takes one final turn, then you count your points on cards played to see who wins, with some cards having special scoring bonuses.

Four savannah animals; the number at the lower-left shows the number of copies in the deck

Gameplay in Origami is simple and straightforward, with most turns presenting you with the best kind of tension in any game: the pull between picking up more cards (i.e., resources) to give you more options in the future vs. playing cards now to put points on the table and possibly give you special powers to use.

With every play, you want to be as efficient as possible. Don't pick up cards with only two or three folds when you're allowed to pick up four. Don't play a card with a scoring bonus if you don't plan to make that bonus worth anything. Don't play a card with an instant effect (which most of them have) if you can't make use of it that turn. The gorilla, a savannah card, lets you pick up all savannah cards on the market when you play it. Should you play it if only one savannah card is available? What if that one card is another gorilla, which gives you four folds in hand (i.e., a free draw action) and the threat of another gorilla action in the future?

Every time you pick up cards, you're putting new cards into the market for the players that follow, something that might affect your choices during play. In one game I managed to play two chicks and pick up a third without yet having a chicken in hand, the chicken being worth 2 extra points per chick you've played. My right-hand opponent couldn't stop drawing cards completely, but he kept taking actions that would reveal several new cards at once, thus giving me greater odds of grabbing a chicken, which I soon did. Bok bok!

On right: Barnyard success, plus a vulture-powered butterfly

A lot of the special actions are conditional. The spider, a lawn card, lets you draw cards from the market that have exactly six folds. If you can't do this, then you must take the boring regular draw action or do something else. The vulture (sky) lets you use the top card on the discard pile to play an origami from your hand, and while free money is nice, sometimes you don't have the cards needed to pay a cost exactly, which leaves you staring at that top card like a $5 bill just out of reach on the other side of the fence.

Each family has their own type of powers and effects, giving Origami a different feel based on the cards in play. The savannah cards are all instant effects, mostly related to drawing cards in some manner. The sea cards give you discounts off the cost of a card or the ability to play a second card immediately (while still paying the cost of it). The lawn cards tend to benefit from other cards of the same family, such as the ant cards that jump from 3 to 5 points if you have at least two of them or the caterpillar that can transform into the far more valuable butterfly. The sky cards interact with other players, the cards they have, and the discard pile. I don't even know what the farm cards do as I haven't played with them yet.

Origami combines the joy of card game randomness with extra variety of play thanks to the five families of cards, of which at most four will be used each time. The only downside is that the graphic design isn't ideal, with a card's cost and fold count being bunched together in the upper left corner and not differentiated enough, with the fold digit being too small for my old eyes. Aside from that, right now Origami is the game I'm most regretful for not having played more times before writing about it, but SPIEL '17 is almost upon us, so I wanted to give a head's up about the game to fellow card game lovers.

Sample critters from the other four families