[Ad- gifted product] 7ate9 is the latest one of the Ideal family game collection to be doing the rounds at the house – it’s a fun little card game based around quick maths and hand management. It’s also, like the other recent Ideal games which I’ve written about, got a really cool, compact storage option that comes with it. In 7ate9 the goal is quite simple, as a matter of fact, you just have to get rid of all of your cards before the other players.
Each card is oval-shaped, with a main number printed twice in the middle of it – so it can be seen from upside-down and right-side-up. This number can be from 1 through to 10, with ten. Then, in the corner of each card, there is a plus and minus symbol as well as a number from 1 to 3. Each card is coloured to match this little, top-corner multiplier – useful to remember for quicker play.
Play is as simple as the goal. The first player places their card, and then the game begins as a free-structured race to clear your deck. The first player, for instance, might lay a 5, with a +/- 2 icon on it. In this case, a 3 or 7 card can be laid on it. Play keeps going until somebody wins or nobody can move (at which point the card from the base of the pile is put to the top and play restarts).
As you can imagine this does get a bit fast, especially as players start rushing to clear their hands – we definitely had a few instances where two or more people put cards down at the same time, this did stifle the pace a little bit, but we made decisions based on who had the most cards left.
7ate9 is a really fun, little family game, albeit not quite as suitable for the youngest children due to the math component. That said, the cards – as I said about the Grabolo components – are pretty easy to use for other games. We played a co-operative game of ladders with them, having three piles form into runs – we also talked about possible house rules for the core 7ate9 game, like a player getting to lay an extra card when a 7 becomes a 9, or visa versa, due to the game name.
You can find 7ate9 on Amazon.