Players: 3-6*
Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

* I suggest the higher end of the scale, as the game gets more strategic at that point.

The Components

Big Top comes with:

• 52 cards
• 6 organizing charts
• 30 tokens
• 1 rulebook

Cards: The cards are all regular card size, printed full color on medium-weight cardstock with a gloss finish. They're sturdy enough to stand up to continued play.

There are 13 cards each in 4 suits: clowns, sideshow, animals, and performers. Each suit features a different color (blue, red, yellow, and green), which helped a lot with card identification, though the green and blue blended together across a long table. Each card also features either a gray "P" (for Poster) or else a number between 1 and 6 in either black or white. Overall the suits, shades, and numbers were easy to use, with usability improved by icons and coloration.

The majority of each card is taken up by artwork by Alessandra Cimatoribus which is top quality. It's stylized, colorful, and very attractive. Given that there's a picture of 9 cards nearby, I really don't need to say much more about how pretty these are. Each card also features a bit of color text which connects up to the artwork and really makes the cards thematically. For example in the yellow animals suit we had: bears (1), monkeys (2), lions (3), tigers (4), elephants (5), and horses (6), with a nice bit of text about each.

The majority of my cards were unfortunately somewhat tacky, as if the finish hadn’t set right. It did not impact shuffling or play, but was a bit annoying. Apparently this problem has also been reported by some other consumers, though I haven't seen it referenced in any other reviews.

Organizing Charts: These are colorful charts printed on stiff, heavy cardstock intended to mark bids, keep track of score, and also hold "called" cards. A set of four colored space (blue, green, yellow, and red) across the bottom hold the gate receipt markers, while a score track marked 1-20 runs through the middle. The opposite side of the chart has spaces for 4 called cards, labelled $3, $2, $1, and $0.

It's a pity these had to be folded in half to fit in the box, but beyond that they're appealing and also quite useful in the game.

30 Tokens: These are thin cardstock squares which you have to separate before your first game and which are heavily perforated as a result. There are five for each player, a scoring marker with a "+20" on one side and four gate receipt markers, labeled $3, $5, $7, and $10. They're in 6 different colors, though some colors are pretty indistinguishable (particularly the purple and the blue). Fortunately this really doesn't matter as each player keeps his own tokens on his own organizing chart.

Rulebook: A simple black and white rulebook with minimal illustrations. It does a fine job of explaining the game, and features a nice example of play as well as the rules for the original Fan Tan, but is otherwise unexceptional. It's printed in English and German.

Box & Tray: The box is pretty badly oversized for the components, but a tray helpfully keeps the cards in place. There's unfortunately no good place to put the tokens. I really need to go grab a plastic baggie for mine before they get lost.

It's with some regret that I've ultimately decided to give Big Top a purely average "3" out of "5" Style. On their own, without production problems, the cards would have rated a "5" because they're well-produced, well laid out, and beautiful to look at. However, the problems with the card finish as well as the lower quality of the tokens and the fairly plan black & white rulebook drag the game down to a "3".

(I should note that I chatted with the publisher, who said that he'd talked with the printer about the finish problem, and also that the tokens ended up being a lot thinner than they wanted. I'd thus expect the Component quality to head upward for future APE games; given the high quality of artwork and layout in current products--both Big Top and Anathema--that's an exciting prospect.)

The Gameplay

In Big Top your basic object is to empty your hand of cards.

Big Top is a game for 3-6 players, and consists of a number of hands of play equal to the number of players.

Starting a Hand: Each hand starts with the deck of 52 cards being dealt out among the players. Some players may end up with 1 more card than others. As already mentioned, the deck consists of 13 cards each in 4 suits. The suits are then broken up into a "P"oster, a black 1-6, and a white 1-6.

The first thing a player has to do is bid for how good of a job he's going to do of getting rid of each of the suits during the course of the hand. He has a "$10", "$7", "$5", and "$3" token, and he places each token face-down on his organizing chart on the space for one of the four suits.

Clearly, if a player has gotten lucky and been dealt a void, he'll put a $10 on that space. More often, though, he'll have at least a few of each suit and must figure out which are likely to go away and which not.

Playing a Turn: After everyone has made their secret bids, play now begins.

Each turn a player starts out by decreasing the value of called cards. These are cards that are placed in the "call" area of the organizing chart. They're initially placed in the space labelled "$3"; then each card is moved down one space each turn, if possible. Eventually a card ends up down at the bottom called area, which is labelled "$0". I say "if possible" because cards never drop off the bottom, and there can only be one card in each space, thus the called card area slowly fills up during a hand.

Next, the player takes one of the following actions:

1. Play a Called Card; or
2. Play a Card from Hand; or
3. Call a Card; or
4. Pass

Play a Called Card: If one or more of the cards you've placed in your called card area is now playable (more on what that means in a second), you must play one of them--your choice which if there are multiple possibilities.

There's no reward for playing called cards, as there is from playing cards from your hand (more on that in a second too).

Play a Card from Hand: If there is no called card that must be played, you may instead play a card from your hand.

For a card to be playable its predecessor must already be on the table. Posters can be played at any time. For a "1" to be played, the Poster of the same suit must already be on the table. For a "2" to "6" to be played, the previous number of that same suit and color (black or white) must be on the table. In other words, you're building sequences of cards in each suit (and color) in precise numerical order.

When you play a card from your hand, you also receive a reward. Consult all the called card areas for all players but yourself. For every card of the same suit and color in a called area, you receive its called-space value (from $0 to $3). Posters are quite lucrative because they match both the black and white cards of their suit.

Call a Card: If there is no called card to play, you may alternatively call a new card, which simply means putting a card face-up to the $3 called-card space, assuming its empty (which it will be unless all 4 of your called-card spaces are full). You can't call a card that could be played.

As you may have figured out by now, callng a card is generally a bad thing, because it gives other players the opportunity to make money, loses you cards that you could have made money off of when you played them, and also tells your opponents how to block you. However, sometimes you have to call a card, and sometimes you choose to because you don't want to play your good cards quite yet, in the hope that they can be worth more money in the future.

Pass: You can only pass if you have no legal action, that is if you don't have any required called card plays, if you can't call a card because your organizing chart is full, and if you don't have any legal plays of cards from your hand.

Ending a Hand: A hand ends when someone plays their last card: he can't have any more either in his hand or on his organizing chart.

Each player now totals his gate receipts by flipping over the bidding tokens he put on his organizing chart. He gets the gate receipt value of any suit that he managed to get rid of before the end of the hand. Clearly the player who went out gets the value of all four tokens: $3 + $5 + $7 + $10 = $25. Each other player will have gotten somewhere between $0 and $22 receipts. Each player then adds this gate receipt sum to the value he made off of called cards during the hand, and that total is recorded. High values tended to be $25 - $45 during a 6-player game. The lowest value for a hand was $10.

Ending the Game: The game ends when one hand has been played for each player, with the player with the highest money total at that point being the winner.

How the Game Plays

Each hand starts out with players assessing the value of their cards and placing his bids. Usually it's easy to figure out your best suit (a void or a low-value singleton) and that earns the $10 marker, and sometimes it's easy to figure out your worst (a high-value singleton) and that earns the $3 marker, but it's often hard to valuate the ones in-between (which is worse a black 5, black 6 in a suit, or a white 4, black 4 in the suit?).

Play then begins, usually with players dropping a couple of cards to their call area. There can be real strategy in this, as playing cards can eventually encourage others to start the suit with the Poster, and thus you try and make sure its your most difficult suit that gets the first poster, rather than a competitor. Eventually, the value of called cards rises high enough that a Poster comes out--sometimes several.

Throughout the hand there's a constant give and take of cards getting called and new possibilities being opened up for play. Sometimes a particular subsuit comes to a sudden and unexpected halt, when it reaches a card that someone is hoarding for whatever reason, but just as often once a subsuit really gets going, it runs up to the 6.

Toward the end of the game, the called areas are quite full. This forces people to play cards they were hoarding and push forward the game. It also gives players more opportunity to see which cards are safe to call, usually depending on whether there's a domino effect in front of them waiting to happen (e.g., if you have the yellow/black "6" and note that the play area is only up to "1", but that the "3" through "5" are all in call areas, it becomes a more desirable play, because there's only one card blocking the whole subsuit from going down, the "2").

Eventually, someone goes out. It's possible some players might be quite far behind, but generally most have managed to get down to just one suit. The final scores usually end up being more dependent upon the cunningness of in-game play to gain money than based upon emptying the suits, since everyone works very hard toward the last goal and generally achieves similar success. (In all 6 hands in my playtest game, I ended up with just 1 suit in my hand, usually my $5 bid, but sometimes my $3 bid; other players, however, did do worse on occasion.)

(The above description is of a 6-player game with pretty aggressive players. There'd be more play and less stonewalling with less aggressive players, and less calling overall with less players; Generally I think the game works better with the higher player numbers due to the latter consideration, as calling results in a lot of the strategy.)

Relationships to Other Games

Big Top is inspired by the child's game Fan Tan; in the older game there's no calling, you just play or pass. You also play out from the "7" in each direction, rather than from a poster. Big Top is clearly a lot more strategic. Fan Tan is also called Sevens or Parliament or Card Dominos.

I'd ultimately classify Big Top as a card climbing game with tight constraints and unique bidding and delay mechanisms. In Card Climbing games, cards must always be played in ascending sequence, and the goal is most frequently also to empty your hand of cards. The biggest difference between Big Top and more traditional Card Climbing games are: that it isn't played in strict tricks, but rather onto general areas of the table; that all suits are climbing simultaneously; and that you just play single cards, not pairs, triplets or Poker hands. For the last reason in particular I've labeled it as a "Singleton Card Climbing" game. 6 Nimmt! is another game that seems to fit the same approximate category.

Some folks would instead classify Big Top as a type of Card Matching game These are games in which you have to play cards to the table, matching the last card in play in specific ways. The best known is Uno, which has simple suit or number matching requirements, though I recently reviewed Spooks which included a very similar card climbing mechanism to this, amongst more traditional suit-matching requirements. I decided to ultimately ignore this classification for Big Top because the cards only match in one manner: through simple, ascending/climbing play.

The Game Design

Big Top is overall a simple card game with a fair random element, that nonetheless allows for a good level of strategy and is fairly unique in its design. Here's some of my favorite design elements:

Bidding Unique & Fun: The bidding aspect, where you try and figure which cards you're going to get rid of, is quite enjoyable because it lets you self-set goals for an individual hand. Lots of card games involve some sort of bidding, from Bridge to Spades, but this one is pretty unique because it's entirely private and also not nearly as tense as trick-bidding--which could result in absolute victory or terrible defeat.

Multiple Paths to Victory: There is a lot of different strategy in this game. Some possible strategic moves include: what do you play? What do you hold on to? What do you call? What suits do you open up? What do you bid? Each move can be used to try and manipulate other players into making decisions that will in turn benefit you.

Nice Theming: The theming of the components is done well, as already discussed, but there's also some nice abstractions in the way that calling works. You're basically putting a card out, saying, for example, "Here's my yellow/black 2, I'd really like to see the yellow poster", and then someone else can decide that the value you're offering is high enough to play that card ("Ah, there are now $8 worth of offerings for the yellow poster, so I'll play it".) The theming of the cards nicely matches this: you need posters to advertise your acts, then to build your acts in an ascending manner.

Fun Brinkmanship: Finally, the play allows for fun brinkmanship; if you're holding on to a low card you constantly have to decide whether its value will go up or down the next round, as new called cards could be played, but the value of all called cards will descend--unless they're already at their minimums.

Here's my only real complaint:

Sometimes Too Long: For 5 or 6 players, the game ends up being too long: more like 2 hours than the 45 minutes advertised. To resolve this, I suggest reducing the number of hands from n to perhaps n/2 for a 6-player game (e.g., 3 rounds, probably with every other person dealing to assure the best fairness possible).

Some Random Factor: As with any true card game, there's a real random factor, based on what you get dealt. I think you have a lot of power to overcome arbitrary draws through clever play. As I said I managed to get down to my last suit on every single hand, and I thought I had some really bad hands sometimes. However, at least once a player got badly stuck with a terrible hand, and that cost him any standing in the game.

Overall, Big Top offers enjoyable and fairly original play that has a fair random element, but still allows a lot of strategy. I give it a "4" out of "5" for Substance: above average.

Conclusion

If it weren't for the problems with the finish of the cards, I'd recommend Big Top without question. The cards look beautiful, the game is well designed and original, and it's generally fun too. If you enjoy classic card games, this will be a great addition to your collection, due to its strategy and originality.

Given that the cards' finish is somewhat tacky (at least in my copy; it's been mentioned by others, but I expect the problem isn't universal since it isn't highlighted in other reviews), however, I leave it to your own aesthetic judgement. If that type of thing bugs you, you'd do best to pass, but if not, it's a product well worth supporting.