Four of us tried this Amigo card game designed by Rudiger Dorn tonight. It played ok but was a bit long for what it was.
Basically, at any one time, there were four treasures up for grabs, some of which gave positive points and some negative (although the negatives could be turned to positive by subsequently winning an identical negative card). From your hand of four treasure cards, you play a single card in either your or an opponent’s colour against one treasure. You also can play an action card, which essentially alters the normal rules and either helps you or hinders someone else. After a certain number of cards have been allocated to a particular treasure, it scores for the person with the most points of their colour placed against the card. Once all the treasure cards have been won, the person with the most net positive points wins.
Once we got into the swing of what we were trying to do, the game ran reasonably smoothly but there didn’t seem to be too much forward planning one could do. Each turn was basically optimising a gain for yourself or hitting somebody else. For a quick card game, it seemed to take a bit too long overall but, with four, there didn’t seem too much downtime between turns.
In our game, Rebecca and I seemed to be trading blows to knock each other down, although Jan was definitely doing her best to make sure I didn’t prosper. In the end, Catherine edged the win, although Rebecca did really well in transforming her negative cards into positive points and only ended up one point behind the winner.