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Seasons is a unique variant of Rummy, produced by newcomer, Dust Bunny Games.
Players: 2-4
Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Seasons is a card game that comes with:
- 220 cards
- 1 scorepad
- 1 rulebook
The Cards: The cards are printed at regular card size on medium-heavy cardstock in full color. There's no coating or texturing, but the stiffness of the stock is probably sufficient to keep the cards intact through play. (After three full games, the deck that has been used in every game shows little to no wear.)
The cards are divided up into 4 different decks of 55 cards: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Each deck in turn has 4 suits (moons, stars, suns, and planets) of 12 cards each (1 through 12, also labelled "Jan" through "Dec"), plus 7 special cards (4 holidays, 2 wilds, and 1 birthday). All of the decks are identical, other than the coloring of the backs and the outside of the fronts; the only difference in actual play is that you score a little better for the cards of your "season".
The face of each card has a variety of information. The outer frame shows the season of the deck, blue for winter, green for spring, orange for summer, and red for fall. Then there's the number and the name of the month, just inside the frame. The number is inside the symbol for the suit. An inner frame is also color-coded for the season of the card's month. There's four months of each season, with the border months (e.g., March/3) having two different colors in the frame (e.g., winter blue and spring green). Finally, there's a drawing of a few houses, a lake, and some trees in the middle of the card, which changes as the seasons pass.
Overall, the cards are a bit of a sensory overload the first time you play, though that wears off through additional games. They're also very colorful, and very pretty. They're fun to play with and are aesthetically pleasing when laid out.
There are a few minor nuisances with the cards. The numbers are indented just a little too far, and this means you have to fan your cards wider than is comfortable. The fall and summer colors are too close in color when shown on the frame. The two-season frames do their shading in a way that it's possible to see only one color when fanning your cards (especially when the more hidden color is the same as your deck's background color). However, these nuisances are just that: minor. They do detract a bit from usability, but not from the beauty of the cards.
Scorepad: The scorepad has, at a guess, 50 or so pages, each one of which is used to score a single player in the game. It's printed in black and white, but is well laid out and makes the (complex) scoring fairly simple. Hopefully they'll have this score sheet up on their website as a PDF before I run through all ~50 sheets. (I've chatted with the designer, and he says they are indeed working on making a PDF available.)
Rulebook: A 12-page, full-color glossy rulebook. It's very pretty to look at, fairly easy to follow, and has a great sidebar through the rules which has examples. A glossary is good for reference, though I was a bit annoyed that I had to read through it to find a couple of answers I expected to see in the main rules.
Box & Tray: The box is almost exactly the size of the components. A plastic tray inside the box has four slots, one for each deck of cards. The tray's slots are just a tiny bit too shallow, and thus sometimes the top couple of cards slide around, but overall it's quite good. Personally, I would have adored having a tuckbox for each deck, to make the game more portable when my wife and I travel, but the box & tray as is meet any reasonable expectations I could have.
I was a bit torn on a Style rating for this game. I really prefer my cards to be glossy and/or linen textured, but after looking over my played decks, I have to admit these are holding up entirely well. I don't think the choice to instead go with a very sturdy card stock is much of a detriment. However, the usability problems I mentioned are a bit more of an issue. The number indents and the color shading choices are just enough to cause some small problems in most games. Thus I've decided to go with a high "4" out of "5" for the Style. Darned good for a first game.
The Game Play
Seasons is a Rummy game, meaning that the point is to empty your hand of cards by laying down valuable sets and runs. Seasons varies from typical Rummy games in that: each player gets their own deck; the cards are uniquely themed; there are a handful of special cards; and scoring is quite unique.
Setup: Each player starts Seasons by choosing their deck. There are four choices: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. The decks are identical other than special seasoning coloring--which affects scoring at the end.
To start a round of play each player shuffles his deck, then deals 12 cards to himself and flips the first card of his deck face up to form a discard pile.
Afterward, each player will have their own deck of cards in front them, and their own discard pile next to it.
Order of Play: Seasons follows a very standard order of play for Rummy:
- Draw
- Play
- Discard
Draw: In Seasons, you can actually draw from a number of places: your draw pile; any discard pile; or, sometimes, other draw piles.
Drawing From Your Draw Pile. You can take the top card from your own seasonal draw deck.
Drawing from a Discard Pile. You can take the top card from anyone's discard pile, not just your own.
In addition, in the flavor of Rummy 500, you can "dig down", taking all of the cards in any draw pile from any specific card, to the top of the draw pile (e.g., you could take the top four cards in a pile). If you do this, you must be able to immediately played the bottom card that you took.
Note that both of these options allow you to get cards from other people's decks. These cards can, in some cases, stay with your deck, and get shuffled in for the next round of play (as is discussed further in "Ending a Round", below).
Drawing from Another Draw Pile. You can take the top card from someone else's discard pile if it's of your season (e.g., originally from your deck).
Play: There are three types of plays in Seasons: runs, sets, and layoffs. There are also a number of special cards.
Playing a Run: You can play a run when you have four or more cards in sequence in the same suit (e.g., 3-4-5-6 of moons). Runs wraparound (e.g., 11-12-1-2 of suns).
 Playing a Set: You can play a set when you have four or more cards of the same number in the same or different suits (e.g., four "7"s).
Playing a Lay-Off: You can play a layoff when you have one or more cards which can be added to an existing run or set, either in your play area or in someone else's. Layoffs can later be played on layoffs as well (e.g., there's a 6-7-8-9 run in suns and so I can layoff a 10 of suns, which unfortunately lets my opponent then layoff his 11-12 of suns).
Playing Special Cards: There are a number of special cards in Seasons.
Wild Cards can be played to substitute for any card in a run or a set.
Birthday Cards can be played with a set (making them effectively Wild Cards for sets only).
Holiday Cards are labelled with a pair of months (e.g., "6/7" or "Jun/Jul", which is "Summer Vacation"). They can be played in a run if one or both of the adjacent cards are part of the run.
 In all cases, wild cards, birthday cards, and holiday cards count toward the 4-card minimum needed to play a set or run (e.g., "3-3-3-birthday" is a legal set and "harvest moon [9/10]-10-11-12" is a legal run).
Discard: At the end of your turn you must discard a card. Discards always go into the appropriate season discard pile, meaning that if you discard someone else's card, it goes into their pile.
Ending a Round: A round of play ends when someone successfully plays their next to last card, then discards their final card. At this point, all scoring is done. The scoring is mildly complex, and I won't try and run it all down here. You essentially get (or lose if it's in your hand) 5 points for each month card and 10 points for each holiday card. Beyond that, you also get bonus points for any complete year you played (a run of 1 through 12), for any complete season you played (e.g., spring, which is 3 through 6), for any cards you played in the season of your deck (e.g., if I have the Spring deck, every card that's 3-6 and the Spring Fever holiday each give me bonus points), and for any cards you played, or were still holding in your hand, that belonged to an opponent.
Afterward you reshuffle your deck, including any opponent's cards that were in your hand or your play area, and you deal yourself a new hand for a new round of play.
Ending the Game: The game ends when someone breaks 365 points (366 in a leap year). For the two-player games I've played, this seems to be 3-5 rounds of play, but it'll vary depending on how aggressive you and your opponents are about picking up discard piles.
Some Comments on the Decks: The fact that each player has their own deck of cards makes some huge strategic differences that I didn't immediately grasp from reading the rules.
The biggest difference from basic Rummy is that there are multiple discard piles. First, this means that you have multiple places to pick up cards from. Second, this means that where you're forced to discard a card can have major tactical results (e.g., it's very different to put a "3" into a discard pile that already contains two "3"s than it is to put a "3" into a pile with none). Third, this means that you can play tactical games to keep a card "available" (e.g., if I decided I want to recover the top card from my discard pile on my next round, but I can't immediately play it, I'm likely to purposefully discard a card to an opponent's discard pile, if I can, to try and maintain my card's availability). Thinking not just about what you're going to discard, but also about where it's going to go and what that means if very important to winning the game.
The fact that you can take and hold onto your opponent's cards also makes a difference. First, it's pretty cool, effectively "stealing" cards from your opponent. It has a neat, competive feel to it. Second, this can make major differences to your deck in future rounds. Certain sets or runs will become more or less frequent as your deck evolves. Also, through careful play, you might have grabbed some of your opponent's best cards (e.g., his holidays).
The scoring and other innovations in Seasons are interesting, but it's the two to four decks of cards that really make this an innovative and interesting Rummy variant.
Relationships to Other Games
Seasons is, obviously, a Rummy variant. It's close in feel to Rummy 500, the multiplayer Rummy variant I learned as a kid, whose main distinguishing feature is that you can pick up large parts of the discard pile. Rummy 500 is my personal favorite Rummy, because I feel like there's more tactical ability when you can easily recover cards from the discard pile, so it's nice to see a commercial variant of the game.
I've, to date, reviewed one other commercial set of Rummy cards, Mike Fitzgerald's Mystery Rummy series. I feel like Seasons is about comparable in strategic depth with the median of the Mystery Rummy games. It's most comparable in depth, of the games I've reviewed thus far, with Murders in the Rue Morgue. If you were happy with Rue Morgue's tactical play, you'll probably be happy with Seasons too.
Rummies are themselves set collection games, a wider category of games which includes other card games as well as games like Ticket to Ride, which center more complex board-game play upon a set-collection card system.
The Game Design
Overall, Seasons is a strong Rummy game. Here's some of my favorite elements of the design:
Individual Decks Interesting & Innovative: I've really already said this. As I noted above the individual decks introduce some fun new gameplay. In addition, it's kind of nice to know that there are always multiples of any card you're looking for, which frees up the random factor a bit.
Multiple Discard Piles Provide Excellent Strategy: Another repeat, but there's a lot more strategic focus here than you'd expect. I've numerous times worked to try and figure out how to pick up cards from draw pile #1 that I needed to pick up cards from draw pile #2.
Scoring Provides Some Additional Interest: At first I found the scoring kind of annoying due to its complexity, but as I played more I realized that it pointed you toward a couple of simple ideas for improving your score, mainly: playing complete seasons and favoring cards of your own season. The scoring does take a few minutes at the end of each round, but each person just runs through their chart, and it's actually fairly simple.
Here's some of the issues I had with the design:
Initially Overwhelming: The first time you play Seasons it can be a bit overwhelming. The cards contain a lot of information, and you also need to watch multiple discard piles, instead of the more typical one. By a second or third game, this will all become second nature, but be aware it'll be an issue the first time through.
Lay-Offs and Scoring a Slightly Awkward Mix: The way that lay-offs interact with the scoring feels a bit awkward. The biggest problem is that other people laying off your run can spoil a season or yearly run, which just doesn't seem quite fair. A more minor example is the birthday card, which benefits the person who played it, but not anything laid-off his set. Neither of these are problems once you adjust to the way the game plays, but they do feel a bit incongruent, as if two different paradigms of play are bashing together.
Standard Rummy Issues: This game still does suffer from some fairly standard Rummy issues. The biggest is what I call the "draw problem". It's easy to get into a state at the end of a round where you and your opponent are each just drawing for the one or two cards that will let you go out. Another standard Rummy issue is that it can start to get confusing to see which cards are laid-off of which cards in a protracted round of play. (I've started to put lay-offs sideways to make them a bit more obvious.)
Overall, Seasons is a very worthwhile expansion of standard Rummy. It still is clearly a Rummy game but the extensions have gone to make the game more strategic and more colorful. As a result I give it an above average "4" out of "5" for Substance.
After I got my review copy of this game, my wife and I played it four nights straight. (We're Rummy fans.)
Conclusion
If you like Rummy-style card games, this is an excellent option. It's a real improvement over standard Rummy, with beautiful components, and it's a nice change of pace from other strategic Rummy games, like Mystery Rummy.
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