Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 15 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)

The Components

Pepper comes with a deck of 52 cards and a rulebook in a small tin.

Cards: 52 medium-weight textured cards. There are 10 each of green, purple, and yellow and 11 each of blue and orange. Each card shows its color, a value from 1-5 (or 1-6 in the case of the two longer suits), and a ball, moving with a velocity related to its value. They're simple but easy to use.

Rulebook: A small rulesheet, folded up like a series of cards to fit in the tin. They're full color and though I thought they were mildly obtuse, they were easy to learn from. They also had some strategy notes.

Tin: The whole game comes in a metal tin, like a mint tin, which is just the right size for the cards and rules. It has a lift-off top, which is my favorite type of card box, and it's very sturdy and will fit right in your pocket. Overall, a great little piece of packaging.

On the whole the components of Pepper are simple and relatively average. They earn a high "3" out of "5", slightly high thanks mainly to the packaging.

The Gameplay

The object of Pepper is to get rid of your cards.

Setup: Each player is dealt 5 cards. The remaining cards are put away.

The game begins with one player "throwing a ball", which means taking a card and placing it in front of another player.

Playing Cards: When a player is "thrown a ball" he must respond. He can do one of two things.

He can respond to the card by playing another card of the same color or a higher number in front of another player.

Or; he can pick up the entire pile of cards in front of him, then play any card in front of another player.

Winning the Game: The game ends when a player plays his last card and the person he plays it to is forced to pick it up. That player who played his last card wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Pepper is a card-matching game. In this style of play players are trying to empty their hands of cards, but must follow certain rules to do so. Crazy Eights and Uno are the best known members of the category. Spooks is another modern game that I've reviewed in the same category.

The Game Design

Pepper has some cute theming, and the idea of getting to choose who to pass a card to is interesting, because it introduces elements of memory and tactics to the cardplay.

Unfortunately, it really doesn't work. The main problem is that no player trying to win should ever pass play to someone who has just one card left. Thus, the game goes around and around with players only passing to other players still holding cards, and more and more players with just one card left are forced to sit out, waiting until everyone else plays down. Eventually everyone (except probably the last "in" player) is down to one card. That last player chooses which player at one card to pass to, and that player probably wins.

The gameplay is largely degenerative and the ending is an entirely anti-climatic kingmaking.

I think that kids might like this game, but it doesn't work if played by anyone with any strategy. I thus have to give it a "1" out of a "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

This card-matching game looks clever at first, but the gameplay is degenerative, and the ending anticlimatic.

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