FLUXX

What's the most simple game you know?

Tag? S'easy! Pass the Parcel? Child's play! Pin the tail on the donkey? I could do it blindfolded! Cricket? (hang on, how did that get in there? shurely shome mishtake?) Certainly not!

I'm sure we could all come up with a list of a few games that were SO straightforward to play, that it would be easier to buy a bit of authentic moonrock from an alien whose just landed in your back garden, than come up with a less complex game. But I think I have it.

What could be more easy than having a pile of cards and one simple rule: TAKE A CARD, PLAY A CARD?

Well, that's the starting point of Looney Labs' amazing FLUXX.

The game starts with you having 3 cards in your hand. Then you take one from the top of the remaining pile, and play a card.

"Wow! Sounds like a heapload of fun!" you cry sarcastically. As well you might, were that all there was to it. But that's where the game starts to take on a life of its own. You see the pack contains cards that have a whole host of new rules that take precedence over any pre-existing rules. Reread that sentence again so you get the full impact of what it says.

So you might play a card that says pick up FOUR cards, so now the next person takes FOUR cards and plays ONE - jeepers, your hand's gonna be fuller than a very full full thing soon. Next, another player adds another new rule. Oooh 'eck, it's HAND LIMIT OF ZERO - you gotta get rid of all those cards you've been hoarding from picking up 4 a turn! It looks like you worried unnecessarily about growing a bigger pair of hands. Next card played is RULES RESET - great, we're back to where we started. And so it goes.

Although it may not seem like it, there is a point to the game and that is to meet whatever GOAL is in play at the time - GOALs, of course, can change as the rules do!

So soon, what was a simple card game with but one rule becomes the most mind-numbing cerebral challenge you've taken on since that fiendish Sudoku in the Times on Saturday! And the game is therefore never the same twice?

I have something to add at this stage, and this is a TRUE story. A group of pupils and I won an all-expenses paid trip from the UK to GENCON in Milwaukee (to me it will always be home of "The Safe House" - surely the best eatery and drinkery in the world! and a SPIRITUAL WEIGHTLIFTER of the future). Whilst at GENCON, someone I did not know came up to me (I repeat, I swear this is true) and said "I'll buy you that game" pointing at FLUXX. I was taken aback at this offer from a stranger, but being a Scot at heart, I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He went on, "and if you don't like it, I'll give YOU, MY money back!" And so he bought it for me, adding before he departed, "I just wanted to do that to somebody - to introduce them to that wonderful game".

And do you know something? Since then I have done the same thing TWICE to complete strangers. It's a wonderful feeling to do something as unpredictably generous as that.

So having said all that, WHY is FLUXX a SPIRITUAL WEIGHTLIFTER? Well I think it gives great hope to us all that something of such perceived simplicity can grow and develop into a complex and enjoyable challenge. There' s a message in there for us all I think.