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Circus FlohcatiList Price: $11.95
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The world-renowned Flohcati Brothers circus is in town, but with lions and tigers and bears, oh no! This is the smallest circus known to man: the flea circus. Players compete to collect the best fleas of each kind. Be the first to collect all ten and you could be the winner! As always, Reiner Knizia offers several ways to score and scratch your way to victory, so getting all 10 kinds will not guarantee the win.
This quick game which is very easy to learn can even be played with just two players. The mechanics of the game are simple and because it is short I tend to play several games in a row.
We have played Zirkus Flohcati for three months now--not constantly, but many, many times! ...and it has more than lived up to the great first impression it made. As expected, it does play as well for four or five as for three players. The Gala Show doesn't win every hand--sometimes we even get to the bottom of the deck without anyone declaring it--but on the hands where the Gala Show is declared, it seems to win about three times out of four.
For a quick strategy game filled with moans, groans, laughter and grins, you can't beat it!
We played this last night for the first time with just three players and found it quite good! Since it's difficult to find a card game that works well with exactly three players, this is impressive. And although we haven't actually seen it in action yet, we expect it'll work just as well with four or five.
There is a resemblance here to a couple of other Reiner Knizia card games, Lost Cities and Digging, in that the game consists of going through a deck of cards just once and seeing how well you can score while that's happening. Zirkus Flohcati is different, though, in that the game can be ended long before the deck is exhausted by announcing a 'Gala Show'--at least one card in your hand of all ten of the colors in the deck. In our limited experience, we found that the player with the Gala Show won every time, whether announced early or late in the run through the deck.
Amassing the Gala Show is not especially difficult--but you have to compare its value of 10 points to the 10 points also available for playing a Trio (three cards of different color but same number). But once you've played a Trio to the table, its cards can no longer be used in your Gala Show and no longer score at the end of the game, as do all the cards still in your hand (including the Gala Show).
One nice thing about this game is that the things that score--Trios, the Gala Show, the high number of each color in your hand at game's end--are very simple concepts that can be grasped by anyone who knows how to count. So the game can be played and won by very young players, even while the strategies involved are interesting enough for more experienced gamesters.
Another nice thing is that the ten colors can actually be told apart with very little difficulty--something we don't always find in a German game with a mere five or six colors!
By the way, the Games magazine review is erroneous in one detail. When you are drawing and displaying cards from the deck, you have the right to take any one of those cards into your hand up until the point when you draw a card that matches a color already in the display--as opposed to one that matches a number already in the display.
In conclusion, let me say that Zircus Flohcati is a fun, colorful, and quick game which not only fills 15 spare minutes admirably but also just begs to be replayed!
