We didn’t end up playing the game at the con, and I took it (along with all my other unplayed review games) to Cape Hatteras a month later on another vacation. A couple days after Hurricane Alex blew through and destroyed two of our family’s cars (but that’s another story), I roped my wife, my father-in-law and mother-in-law into a review game of Perpetual Commotion, giving them my usual promise: If you don’t like it, we’ll never have to play it again.
We ended up playing past midnight, and the next evening my father-in-law pointed out that if we could get the kids to bed early we could play it again, and a week after we came back from Hatteras my mother-in-law called me up to say that they were having spaghetti for dinner and if I wanted to I could bring "that card game" with me for afterwards, and we’ve already started recruiting more players. Yep, probably on the good omen side.
Perpetual Commotion consists of six identical 52-card decks (with different-coloured backs; you can buy two more decks from Goldbrick in order to play with up to eight players), an eight-sided die, and a four-page instruction booklet. The box is sturdy, but half of the interior is air (giving you room to add those two extra decks), and it’s not easy to get the cards out of the plastic tray. The cards themselves felt a bit stiff and difficult to separate when new, but they have to face up to considerable abuse in play and you get used to them.
Each card deck consists of four Start cards, four Stop cards, 11 cards with red borders (numbered 2 through 12), 11 blue, 11 green, and 11 yellow. (These colours are independent of those on the card backs, which aren’t important until it’s time to give the mixed-up cards back to their original owners after a hand is finished). The card graphics are rather simple: a large, black numeral in the centre, a wide coloured border, with the numeral repeated smaller in the corners and the colour written out along the sides. The Start cards have black borders with "Start" written twice in the centre and then along each of the edges in all four suit colours; Stop cards are the same with the word "Stop."
One of the three complaints I had about the game was the font used for the large numeral in the centre of the numbered cards. A fancy serif font, it makes 2s and 5s mirror images of each other (it may be hard to believe, but during a fast-paced game you can actually confuse them for each other, especially when someone on the other side of the table plays one upside-down relative to you), and 6s and 9s identical when one is upside-down. The numerals in the corner help with the 2/5 problem, and the designers underlined the 6 to distinguish it from the 9, but it would have been helpful to have underlined the 9 as well, so my frustrated father-in-law eventually took a permanent marker and did just that.
The basic concept of the game is simple: When you get a Start card, you play it immediately to the middle of the table. Starts are wild, so anyone can play any colour 2 on top of the Start, but once that’s done the rest of the cards on that stack have to be the same colour, until a 12 is played, which can then be followed by any Stop card, as they’re wild as well. There’s no turn-taking: everyone plays as quickly as they can, and cards tend to be slapped down with force (I told you the cards would take some abuse) but not a lot of precision.
The first twist in the game is that you don’t have a simple hand of cards to play from. Instead, each player counts out 13 cards and puts them face-down as his Feeders. He then lays out five cards face-up that are his Front Five. The remaining cards (the Playmakers) remain in his off-hand, and he sorts through them solitaire-like: count off three cards and flip them over, looking at the third card; count off three more and flip them over, etc. A player can play the top card of his flipped-over Playmakers (and then the card underneath that, and the card underneath that as applicable), or any card from his Front Five. If he plays a Front Five card, he replaces it with one from his Feeders stack.
When a player empties his Feeders stack (but not his Front Five) he can call "Out," which ends the hand. The player who called "Out" gets 5 bonus points. Then each player fills any gaps in his Front Five from his Feeders stack, and counts how many Feeders he has left (if any), getting -2 points per card. The cards in the centre of the table are flipped over and sorted by backing colour to determine which player played them: these cards are worth 1 point each to their players, and it’s possible (although unlikely) for one of the other players to get a higher score for the hand than the player who called "Out." Scores for individual hands can theoretically range from -26 to +57, but in play we saw ranges from -20 to +40, with -5 to +25 most common. A game lasts until one player hits 150 points, which can take a while (the box says 45 minutes).
Because playing cards from your Front Five is the only way to lower your Feeders stack, and leftover Feeders are worth -2 each, while cards successfully played from your Playmakers stack are only worth 1 point each, it stands to reason that playing cards from your Front Five is three times more important than playing them from your Playmakers stack. Unfortunately, sitting and waiting for your Front Five to be playable and ignoring your Playmakers isn’t a winning strategy, nor is the reverse true. You have to simultaneously keep track of all five of the cards in your Front Five, the top flipped-over Playmaker, the top card on each of the stacks in play in the middle of the table (with four Start cards in each player’s deck, in a six-player game there can be up to 24 stacks of various colours and heights simultaneously in the centre of the table), all the while doing all of your play (flipping cards from the Playmakers, playing Playmaker or Front Five cards to the centre of the table, refreshing your Front Five from the Feeders) one-handed.
For example, if you have a yellow 5 and a yellow 6 among your Front Five, and someone plays a yellow 4 to the middle of the table, you can’t grab your 5 and 6 with two hands and play them at the same time, you have to play the 5 and then go back, grab the 6 and play it with the same hand -- assuming someone else hasn’t played his own yellow 6 in the meantime. On the other hand, if you have a yellow 5 and a yellow 7 in your Front Five and you see that one of the other players has a yellow 6 in his (keeping track of what cards the other players have visible is pretty much beyond us when playing, although I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that very experienced players can do just that), then you can prime yourself so that when you see someone else play the yellow 4, you can play the yellow 5 and immediately go back for the yellow 7, knowing that the other player will play the yellow 6 in that same split-second.
The concentration necessary can be intense, and for all its speed surprisingly Perpetual Commotion is the quietest card game our family plays. With the exception of the slap of cards, triumphant shouts when you manage to beat someone racing to play the same card, and the occasional correction when someone misplays a card, there’s hardly a word spoken. (Although one game my mother-in-law was heard to swear under her breath, and as my wife says, any game that can make her mother cuss has to be either very good or very bad.)
My second complaint about the game is a quirk of the scoring. Before every hand after the first, the one who called "Out" rolls the d8. On a 1, 3, 5, or 7 nothing happens, but on an 8 he immediately loses 10 points from his total score, on a 2 or 6 the person to call "Out" in the next hand gets 10 or 20 bonus points (instead of 5), and on a 4 everyone gets double points for their score for the next hand (positive or negative). We quickly decided that the game was fun and challenging enough without this random factor added in, and so we dispensed with the die.
My third complaint was another rule that we discarded. At the start of each hand the players shuffle their decks of cards, but in order to ensure fair shuffling and a simultaneous start they each hold their shuffled decks in their left hands while grasping the deck of the person to their right with their right hands. When someone says "Go," every player lets go with his left hand and grabs with his right, and begins counting out his Feeders and Front Five. While this may be worth considering when playing tournaments with a bunch of strangers, in a friendly family setting these security concerns are (hopefully) unnecessary.
On the other hand, there are a few other incidental rules worth mentioning. Because the shape of the table may it hard for some players to reach into the centre of the playing area, when playing at such a table players must rotate seating positions each hand. And because every second counts, there are no timeouts: if you drop a card onto the floor or want to straighten-up messy stacks, do so at your own risk. And while you can’t call "Out" until you’ve emptied your Feeders stack, you’re not required to call "Out" at that exact moment; if you clear your Feeders and see that you have a card in your Front Five or the top card in your Playmakers stack that can be played immediately, it may be worth your while to play that card for the extra point before calling "Out," understanding that a second’s delay could allow someone else to beat you to the "Out" and the bonus points that go with it.
(Talking to the designers, they had to add a house rule that cards must be placed (slapped, slammed, whatever) on stacks, not thrown (even if an accurate throw lands a card in the right spot). For our group, we added no playing Starts where they’re unreachable by other players, no moving stacks once they’ve been started, and no loud singing of humourous song parodies if the intent is to cause the other players to crack up and miss important plays.)
Perpetual Commotion looks good, plays well, and is simple to learn but hard to develop an overwhelming advantage at. It has only a few very limited strategic options, but with so many things to do in play you don’t find yourself getting bored repeating the exact same actions over and over. And it certainly lives up to its tag line: "Where fast hands rule the table."Perpetual Commotion was my non-roleplaying pick of the summer conventions.
