#uno dos

UNO Dos, unlike UNO, tends to be way more tense than UNO tended to be, because it's really easy to get to the final stage of play for all players, and it becomes this really tense phase where everyone is waiting to call out someone else for not saying The Word (in Dos' case, it's “dos” when you hit two cards), and the fact that literally someone else can make everyone draw cards from the draw pile by a certain match. So games can get tense and as a consequence, pretty fun.

UNO Flip, despite billing itself as a darker, edgier UNO (instead of drawing two and four cards, depending on game mode, you might end up drawing five cards… or any number of cards, assuming the other player isn't bluffing), is less unpredictable than UNO, mostly because if you end up in a hole, it's really hard to work yourself out of one. I've had circumstances where I ended up with over twenty cards in my hand (multiple +5 cards are really easy to bring to bear), and once you're in that position you're so busy trying to manage the cards you might as well kiss any chance of victory goodbye.

Monopoly Deal, though: god. I hate how this game makes me feel. I'm either paranoid of losing what I have (the only safe place for your property is in your hand, but you need them in play for it to count), but also I'm in a position to look at which player is more vulnerable so I can put myself in the position of taking their property. So what you do is you plot to take away someone's cash, which serves as a shield against most but not all of the Bad Shit™ you can pull against a player. were-cow loves this mechanic, but I frankly hate how it makes me feel, especially when you're planning to do this against an 8-year old kid, who is incidentally your offspring. I dunno about you, but that makes me feel shitty and I usually can only play two rounds before I need to stop. On the plus side it doesn't have the death spiral dynamic — play stops once one player amasses three complete sets, and if you're out of money and property, it's okay, you don't need to pay — but god.

But yeah. It's interesting the kind of mechanics that are in play, and it's fun to speculate what kind of intentions the designers had in the rules that they create, and the systems that appear as a consequence of those rules.