Aquarius
Aquarius, by Looney Labs, is a multiplayer card game that was originally released in 1998. This month sees the release of the 10th Year Anniversary Edition of Aquarius, which features new artwork, new card types and optional rules for playing with children. The core game mechanic revolves around matching together the elements on cards in domino-style play. The gameplay is also tweaked by the use of action cards, which have various interesting effects.
Overall, Aquarius is a fun, light game that plays very quickly. The card-matching mechanic is easy to pick up, while the action cards make the game more than just dominoes with cards. It’s too bad that there’s just not a lot of depth to the game. My opinion might change if there were kids involved, but I don’t see Aquarius being any more than light filler on game night.
The saving grace of Aquarius, and its ultimate downfall, is the Action cards, because the core of the game is incredibly simple. At the start of the game, each player is dealt a hand of three random cards and a Goal card. On the Goal card is one of the five different elements in the game, and you win when you have a continuous line of seven elements that match your goal. Cards are played to the table side-by-side or end-to-end and must have matching elements whose edges touch. It’s pretty simple stuff.
The Action cards give the game an interesting twist. There are six different types of Action cards. The Zap card lets you pick up and keep any card on the table. The Shuffle Hands card has you take everyone’s hand of cards, mix them together and re-deal them. The Rotate Goals card has everyone pass their Goal cards to the left. The other three are Trade Hands, Trade Goals and Move a Card, each fairly self-explanatory.
These cards help to keep players on their toes, while also giving them options if someone is getting close to winning. The problem is that there’s not a lot of strategy to using the cards. In all the games I played the most interesting actions, the Zap and Move-A-Card cards, came up infrequently, while the Trade and Shuffle Hands cards were usually more trouble than they were worth, and the Rotate and Trade Goals were consistently used to win the game. Why bother working towards your own goal when you can simply wait for someone else to near theirs and then take their goal away from them?
That said, I’d still recommend picking Aquarius up. The 10-30 minute game length listed on the box is an accurate one, and it’s nice to have a game that I can pull out when I’m waiting on stragglers to show up to game night. If you have kids, the bright, colorful artwork and easy gameplay concepts really open the game up to playing with just about any age group. The preschooler variation touted on the box just involves removing the action cards, and even the goal cards, but that doesn’t make it any less valid.
The only recommendation I’m not sure about making is if you already own the original Aquarius. There is a new, diagonal element card, and the Wild card is now part of the standard deck, rather than being a promotional card. The Shuffle Hands action card is also new, and Rotate Goals used to be Shuffle Goals. From what I can tell, those are the only major gameplay changes, so it’s up to you whether it’s worth upgrading.
In the end, Aquarius makes for a great filler game. I have so many deep, intricate, time-consuming games that it’s refreshing to have the option to enjoy some simple fun in between. Aquarius fills that role better than any other game I own right now. As such, I expect it to see plenty of play around my table, even if it’s never a spotlight game.