Players: 2-5 (plus Solitaire variants)
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)

Aquarius is a Looney Labs card game. Others include Fluxx, Chrononauts, and Nanofictionary.

The Components

Aquarius comes in a small card box--the sort of box that card games don't tend to be sold in any more because they don’t support high price points. The box contains: 60 cards and 1 rulebook.

The 60 cards are broken into 3 distinct categories.

5 of the cards are "goal cards". They're easily recognizable by the "goal" backing. Each of the cards displays on its reverse one of the five elements (earth, fire, water, air, and ether).

The other 55 cards all form the main Aquarius deck. 40 of these are element cards. Each of these is split up between either 1, 2, or 4 panels, each one showing a different element. The remaining 15 cards are action cards, which have a variety of results in game.

The cards are all printed on solid cardstock with rounded corners. The elemental drawings are quite simple--they look like line drawings which have been computer shaded--but look very beautiful, particularly as increasing numbers of them are laid on the table.

Overall, the design of the components is quite elegant and clearly carefully thought out. Some of the clever design might not be immediately obvious, such as the fact that there are 5 different types of action cards, matching the dominant numerology of the game; in addition, the picture on each action card features a mode of transport (spaceship, balloon, flying saucer, van, submarine) against the background of one of the elements (fire, air, ether, earth, and water, respectively). This has no effect on the game itself--though it's used to good purpose in one of the solitaire variants--but certainly does tie the game together thematically.

The rulebook is a card-sized 6-page book. It succinctly describes the game's simple rules.

Especially when you factor in the game's dramatically low price point, it's obvious that the Style of Aquarius is top notch. Card games that cost twice this much and pay thousands of dollars for their artwork don't look this good. Aquarius deserves a full "5" out of "5" rating in Style.

The Game Play

At the start of the game each player is dealt 1 goal card (which he keeps hidden & facedown), then 3 cards from the main deck. The goal card displays the player's (current) goal. He must try and connect up 7 contiguous panels of the element depicted on his goal card.

Each turn each player gets to draw 1 card and play 1 card.

The majority of the game involves playing element cards. Each one of these is split between either 1, 2, or 4 panels. An element card may be placed adjacent to any other element card on the table, provided that at least a quarter of the card matches up with a quarter of one card it's being placde adjacent to.

(And note carefully that this means that you don't have to match up to both halves of an adjacent card, nor do you have to match all adjacent cards. You just have to create a harmonious convergence with one other panel.)

The only complexity is that besides the 40 element cards there are also 15 actions cards. You might be playing one of these instead of an element card. There are 3 each of 5 different action cards. They are:

• Trade Goals
• Shuffle Goals
• Trade Hands
• Zap a Card
• Move a Card

They've mostly self-explanatory from their names. Zap a Card lets you pull a card from the board into your hand.

The goal continues until 1 player has 7 panels of his element arranged in a contiguous set of adjacent panels. If no one has won by the time the deck runs out, play continues until all players are out of cards, at which point the person with the most contiguous panels wins.

If you want to see what the game really looks like, try out the online game. It doesn't do the art justice, but is fun.

Game Variants

The game components are simple enough that it's very simple to create more games with them.

Kristin's Solitaire is a solitaire game which uses the goal cards as foundations which must be filled with matching element cards. The action cards control which cards can be moved at any time. Overall, it works well and has somewhat addictive play.

Pantopia is an icehouse game. I've never actually played it because it requires two Aquarius decks, but it looks like fun.

A number of other variants are listed at Looney Labs's Aquarius page.

Relationships to Other Games

Aquarius is clearly a cousin to the classic game of Dominos. It also reminds me quite a bit of pipe-laying games such as Carcassonne. Finally, in its sense of fun and simplicity, Aquarius is also kin to Andrew Looneys' other card games.

The Game Design

As with other Looney Lab card games, Aquarius seems pitched at a fairly casual audience. Here's some of its good points:

Easy to Play: The gameplay is very simple and intuitive.

Fun: The game wins out on the simple "do I enjoy it?" basis. Though I have some issues with the strategic gameplay, I've come back to it again and again.

Fast: One of my dictums of gameplay is that the more random a game is, the faster it should play, so that players aren't notably disgruntled over a totally random loss. Aquarius really does play in 20-30 minutes, as promised at the top of the review, and experienced players might get it down to 10-15 minutes. In the online version, where my opponents are not slow as they are in real life I can whip through a game in 5 minutes.

Some Strategy Due to Hidden Goals: The hidden goals are a very nice feature of the game, because they constantly keep you guessing. You can guess what goal a player may be hiding based on his moves, but he may be actually trying to fool you. Any player can make good or bad moves based on his guesses of other players' goals.

Some Strategy in Placement: There's also some nice strategy implicit in placement of cards. You can try and build toward your goal, try and block opponents, try and throw opponents off of the scent of your goal, etc.

Here's my only problem with the game design:

Victory Largely Random: This is almost entirely a result of the "Trade Goal" and "Shuffle Goal" action cards; it means that you're never working on your actual victory goal early in the game. This problem gets even worse when the deck runs out and all players are forced to play all their cards, which usually results in the goals switching randomly about at the end until one person randomly wins. Some players may find this acceptable, because the game is fast and fun, as noted above. More strategic players may be annoyed, however. The obvious answer is to either eliminate these 2 types of actions or else reduce the amount in the deck. I've tried pulling out all the "shuffle goals" cards and also have tried only having a number of trade and shuffle goals equal to the number of players minus 2. These both worked somewhat but I'm not entirely certain which the best answer is.

(A more technical answer as to why the randomness bugs me: in a game like Fluxx, Looney's first card game design, you can have a huge amount of randomness and have it still be entirely fun. In that game you can lose goals or lose keepers or lose rules that you like, but you never lose everything you've achieved at once, just a little bit here and there. Conversely, in Aquarius, the loss of a goal is a total setback because the other cards you've placed are of almost no value to you at this point, unlike in Fluxx. It's the all-or-nothing aspect of the randomness in Aquarius that I believe makes it troublesome.)

I actually picked this game up years ago, based on how much fun Looney's first card game, Fluxx, was. However the randomness of the game bugged me and so I put it aside for almost five years, before picking it up again recently. It's won me over now, once I saw that the game could be enjoyable if you just downplayed the importance of actually winning, but I can see other players having the same issues.

Combining all that with the fact that the game is fun once you set aside preconceptions, I'd give it an average "3" out of "5" rating for Substance. For a serious gamesplayer, though, I think you'd need to work on some of my possibilities for reducing randomness before it'd be entirely enjoyable.

Conclusion

A very fun, very pretty beers & pretzel game that plays in an appropriately short time (unlike most beers & pretzel games, unfortunately). For a casual gamer a real boon, but possibly less appealing to a serious gamer, unless he can put that seriousness on hold.

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