Players: 2-4
Time: 10 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)

The Components

Loco! comes with a deck of 30 cards, 25 chips, and a rulebook.

Cards: These are slightly flimsy cards printed at regular size. Each one is brightly colored (in blue, red, purple, yellow, or green) and displays a number from 0-5. The "0" cards also say "Loco!"

I thought that the blue was a little close in color to the purple when seen on its own.

Chips: Thick, hard plastic chips in the five colors.

Rulebook: A 4-page, full-color rulebook with some clear illustrations and examples.

Box: There's helpfully a tray to keep the chips separate from the cards. Unfortunately it has exactly the right space for 24 chips, and thus you always have one rogue chip wandering around. Other than that issue, the chip box helpfully keeps the cards on their half of the tuckbox.

Overall the pieces are all colorful and easy to use, and my only genuine regret is that the cards aren't just a bit sturdier. The game earns an average "3" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

Loco! is a very simple game. The ultimate object is to have the most valuable chips at the end of the game.

Setup: The 25 chips are sorted by color and placed in the middle of the table. Two or three cards are removed from the game and then the rest are dealt out to the players.

Play: On his turn a player plays one of his cards from his hand; it goes on top of any other cards of the same color. The player then takes one chip of any color.

If the card was a zero, the player must say "Loco!" before he plays, else he doesn't get to take a chip.

End of the Game: The game ends when the sixth and final card of any color has been played. At this point each color is now worth the value of the last card of that color played (which you may recall is 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5). Each player sums up the value of all of his chips using this valuation, and the player with the most points wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Loco! is a very simple & quick card game which uses chips for a pseudo-betting mechanism. In its simplicity of play it reminds me somewhat of Geschenkt, another simple card game using chips, though one that I think is considerably better because it offers better control of play (more on that momentarily).

Among Knizia's own designs, Loco! is clearly one of his bidding games. It reminds me a bit of Gold Digger and the whole Titan: The Arena series of games, because in every game you're simultaneously making bets on a set number of colors/monsters/mines and then playing cards to improve or decrease the value fo those items. Kingdoms, another Fantasy Flight release, is yet another game using similar ideas. Of all the games Loco! is the simplest and fastest.

Loco! has been released in multiple countries under multiple names with very different components (and without the stupid "shout Loco!" rule in the other versions). Other editions include Flinke Pinke, Quandary, and Thor.

The Game Design

Fairly literally, there's no substance to this game. I've reviewed some games and called them light as air, and this one's even lighter.

Every round you have two important decisions: what card to play and what chip to take. Unfortunately, the game is so totally controlled by chaos that your decisions barely matter. It's what I've sometimes called "false strategy": the game heavily impliest that you can make an important strategic choice, but it actually doesn't matter that much. Up until the last couple of plays other players will always be able to play over your own cards, dramatically changing the value of your chips.

The best you can do is play a very reactive strategy of grabbing chips based upon what cards have had multiple low numbers played, but even that's not a sure thing, unless the low numbers are all gone.

Worse, initial hand distributions can make a huge difference in how well you can do. If you have all 3s (or something closely approaching them) you have almost no way to predict final card valuations because you don't know where high or low cards might be. Conversely if you have a hand of 4 or 5 cards of the same color, that's one of the few situations where you can feel slightly confident about that color's valuation.

And, as I mentioned above, the "Loco!" rule is pretty lame. Maybe if I were approaching this as more of a party game, I might appreciate it, but as is it pissed multiple players off.

The game does have some good things going for it, including ease of play and quick speed. However, I don't think that's enough, and so I've given the game a "2" out of "5" for Substance: lacking.

Conclusion

There's nothing innately wrong with this game, there's just nothing innately right with it either. It's a Reiner Knizia game, but there's almost no real strategy in it--just a crapshoot that implies that you should be able to do something meaningful when you actually can't. If you want a short, simple card game like this, I'd suggest the infinitely superior Geschenkt and if you want a bidding game Knizia's made lots of much better bidding games, including Kingdoms and Colossal Arena, both also available from Fantasy Flight.