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Fuddy Duddy is a simple set-collection card game by newcomer company, Let's Play Games.
Players: 2-8
Time: 30 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)
Fuddy Duddy is small press; if you can't find it at your local store, it's available online.
The Components
Fuddy Duddy comes with a deck of 52 play cards, plus rules, printed on another 3 cards.
Cards: The cards are all medium weight, printed on an attractive, glossy cardstock. Each one depicts between one and four large colored dots, in red, green, yellow, blue, or white. The number of dots is also printed at each corner of the card. The white cards are all labelled "Dud" to remind you that they're something special. There are also two wild "4"s, helpfully printed with the four colors they can be used with (which is everything but white).
Overall, these cards are very simple, but there's been some good work done to make them easier to use.
Rules: The rules are printed on a set of three, double-sided cards. The rules only take up the first card, and everything else is examples and tips, which together make the game very easy to play.
Overall the components for Fuddy Duddy are simple but attractive. They earn an average "3" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Fuddy Duddy is to collect a set of cards from 1 to 4 in the same color.
Setup: Each player is dealt a hand of four cards.
The Cards. The distribution of the cards is somewhat unusual. There are five colors, blue, red, yellow, green, and white. In each color there are three each of the values "1", "2", and "3", but just one "4". In addition there are two wild "4"s which can be used for anything but white.
Playing: On your turn you draw a card, either from the face-up draw pile or from any discard pile. You then discard a card, putting it in a discard pile appropriate for its value (meaning that there may be up to four discard piles, for "1", "2", "3", and "4".
Winning: You win a hand of Fuddy Duddy when you have a set of 1-4 of a color. If your set is blue, red, yellow, or green, the "4" can be a wild, but if you've got a white set, you must have the white 4, making that set quite a bit harder to collect.
The winner gets 20 points for a set (a "Fuddy") or 40 points for a white set (a "Fuddy Duddy"). Anyone with whites ("duds") in their hand gets -5 points per, except for the white "4".
The first person to 100 points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Fuddy Duddy is a very set collection card game. In fact, in feels to me like a simplified version of Rummy, with some slightly different rules about drawing from discard piles.
Personally, I think there's some other simple set-collection games that have a little more depth, among them Coloretto, King's Breakfast, and Sneeze. However, Fuddy Duddy probably feels a bit more like a traditional card game, with its five suits of numbered cards.
The Game Design
There's not a huge amount of depth to Fuddy Duddy. You try and collect a small set of cards in a fairly unidirectional manner, largely based upon your draw of a "4".
However, it also has a few interesting elements that slightly differentiate it.
The existence of the rarer, and potentially costly, dud set offers up some interesting brinkmanship to the game. Do you go for the more dangerous white set in the hope of a bigger win?
The four discard decks are an interesting innovation as well. Things still get buried pretty quickly, but you at least have some chance of recovering a card discarded by someone other that your right-hand neighbor, which nicely offsets some of the chaos that would otherwise appear with more players.
Despite these elements, there's still a huge amount of randomness in the game. If you never draw a "4"--and that definitely happens--you're out of that round. The only real strategy comes through watching the discards for colors that other players aren't collecting, and changing the color you're going for only really becomes a possibility if you grab the necessary "4" as well.
On whole there's nothing wrong with Fuddy Duddy, but there's also not a to it. I've given it a "2" out of "5" for Substance, but think it's a fine game for card-playing adults looking for something to play with younger kids.
Conclusion
Fuddy Duddy is a light and simple Rummy-like game. It doesn't have a lot of depth to it, but it's also a simple enough game to play with younger kids, and may thus be a good choice for parents looking to introduce their children to traditional card games.
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