I don’t know how my family came upon this game, but when my kids brought it out and asked if they could play, my knee-jerk reaction was, oh cool, this seems like a pretty age-appropriate game that my kids can probably get. But after about 15 minutes and the game not ending, my mind started formulating this post, and pondering that if I really wanted to commit, I could probably create a lengthy series of questionable toys/games being made, for the kids of today.
The premise of Crazy 8’s is kind of like a really junior-fied version of Uno; the cards have colors and numbers, and the objective of the game is to empty out your hand before everyone else. 8’s act as the wild cards that the player who plays it can dictate what number or color comes next. There is no calling for Uno, nor are their any malicious Draw Twos or Fours, but the way the game is, there may as well be Draw Twelve, due to the systemic flaws of this game in general.
In all fairness, it’s not really so much a shitty game as it is just poorly balanced and becomes a nigh impossible game to win under certain conditions, especially when playing against a five- and four-year-olds who want to try and bend the rules as soon as their attention span begins to wane.
Basically, there is an extremely disproportionate amount of yellow and greens versus all the other colors; 12 yellows, eight greens, four reds, blues, pinks and four eights. The number 10 cards effectively add four yellows and blues due to them being two digits of different colors, but the point remains that there are way too many yellows and greens, and not enough of any other color.
As games progress, and everyone gets a gist of the rules, inevitably player 1 has no reds or pinks after another player 2 plays an 8 and asks for one of them, so player 1 keeps picking cards until they can find a red or a pink or an eight, but because there’s so few number of cards in general, player 2 or 3 is already sitting on all the reds and pinks, so player 1 ends up with a boatload of yellows or greens, and the game turns into this perpetual stalemate of changing up the colors with eights, nobody having the swapped color, and then another eight being played on top of it, and asking for a color that nobody else has.
My kids and I have played five games of this, two of which I won, #2 won once, and the other two my kids losing interest because they wouldn’t ever end. My kids became wise enough to the game’s system to know that I probably had all the green cards, and every time I played an eight and declared the next card to be green, they’d just draw out enough cards to get another eight, and switch it back to pink, and then the cycle would just repeat until we realized it was a push.
Even expanding on the rules and trying to incorporate accessories like party hats or glasses as a variable to switch things up fell flat, because there just aren’t enough cards or variables to make it a viable expansion.
Either way, this is a game that has some potential, but the lowest of ceilings of quality before any players with brains basically break it due to critical systemic flaws.
So, shitty game alert it has, and I would advise all other parents not to spend any money on this, and even consider covertly regifting it if acquired as a gift.
