Players: 3-5
Time: 10 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)

This is a revision of my original review of Geschenkt!, the first (German) edition of this game, which was produced by Amigo in 2004.

The Components

No Thanks! comes with: 33 cards; 55 chips; and 1 rulebook.

Cards: The cards are all high-quality, thick, linen-textured cards. They're numbered 3-35, but also have some nice graphical design work, to make them look attractive.

Chips: Small, red, plastic chips. Nothing special.

Rules: A single, double-sided rulesheet, printed full-color. It explains the very simple rules, and also has some graphics, some examples, and even some tactical notes, all of which make the th easy game even easier to learn.

Overall, the quality of the components is high, and they're relatively attractive; the game thus earns a solid "4" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

The object of No Thanks! is to get the least points in cards and the most points in chips at the end of a round.

Setup: Each player is given 11 chips. The 33 cards are shuffled, then 9 are set aside, leaving 24 for play. The first card is flipped up.

Order of Play: The gameplay is immensely simple. On a turn a player either: plays a chip on the currently face-up card, which ends his turn; or else takes the face-up card, with all the chips on it. At this point he must then turn the next card face-up, and make the same decision: play a chip or take the card. (Clearly a player must take the card if he has no chips.)

The catch here is that cards are usually bad, while chips are good, and also allow you to pass on future cards that you don't want to take. But you're always going to have to take some cards.

Ending the Game: The game ends when all the cards have been taken.

First each player sums up the value of all of his cards--except if a card is in a sequence ("18-19-20") in which case he only adds on the value of the lowest card. So, if a player had 3-4, 7, 18-19-20, and 22, he'd get 3+7+18+22 points, or 50. The trick here is, as you'll recall, that 9 cards are out of the game, so you can never be assured of completing a sequence.

Then each player subtracts the number of chips he has.

The player with the least points wins.

Relationships to Other Games

No Thanks! is a very simple, filler card game that is easy to play and just takes 10 minutes or so. It fills the same game timeslot as a For Sale or a Hey! That's My Fish!. No Thanks! is a bit shorter than either of those games, and indeed may be the quickest game that I own.

The gameplay is simple yet original, and I haven't seen anything else quite like it. For some reason it reminds me a bit of Wolfgang Kramer's 6 Nimmt!, another short, filler card game with a lot of randomness, yet a strategic core. The desire to collect sequences of cards clearly mark it as an odd sort of set collection game.

The Z-Man edition is the third version of this game. The original was produced by Amigo as Geschenkt, and only available in German. Amigo then produced an international edition called No Merci, which had multilanguage rules, but no good U.S. distribution. Finally this Z-Man edition, called by yet another name, is the first one widely available in the U.S.

The Game Design

No Thanks! is one of those games that's so simple that it's just about impossible to analyze the game design--because it's almost microscopic. Somehow, in the game's sole tactical decision (take the card or play a chip) Thorsten Gimmler manages to encapsulate a very tough decision--and in my opinion it's always the tough decisions that make the best games.

The addition of a set-collection type mechanic adds just enough strategy to keep the game interesting.

And then there's brinkmanship too. ("No one else wants to take the 22, and I have a 21, so it won't hurt me, but what if I pass it around the table one more time? Will I get 4 extra chips or lose my card?")

Managing to include so many strong game design elements in such a simplistic game is nothing short of masterful. No Thanks! is thus one of those fillers that you can play again and again; during one session it hit the table three times before our main game, then another three after. After 14 total plays, my copy of the original Geschenkt game largely stopped being played, but that was mainly because something new and shiny came along. (For Sale, as it happens.) No Thanks! continues to amuse me and I'd be happy to play it any time I needed a 10-minute filler.

Despite its super-light weight, I've given No Thanks! a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

No Thanks! is one of the top light games out there. It takes just a minute to explain, and ten minutes to play, but it not only encapsulates a lot of tough decisions in that timeframe, but also has a simple, addictive quality to it. Now that it's easily available in a U.S. edition, I'd suggest every gamer add this to their collection.