[Ad – Gifted Products] Every other Monday, we find ourselves at our local Geek Retreat playing a board game afterschool. This little tradition always brings a lot of fun to the boring, back-to-school feeling Mondays. This week, we played Boba Bonanza! This is one of those vibrant, bright, fast-paced card games that have a lot of chaos! You need to make sure your family members have the same sort of vibe going into it, as there is a lot of scrambling to be done.
The game itself is quite simple. You will all start with a hand of eight cards, which will likely be all different. To start a round, all players will draw one more face down card from the deck and arrange the cards in their hand. Then, once everyone is ready, there is a count down – which then triggers everyone throwing down a card and chaos beginning. From there, everyone needs to scramble to grab a card from the centre that they want, placing it into their hand, then picking a new one to discard — and repeat. This is done until nobody wants to take any cards from the table.
Once you’ve all decided all the cards are not useable, you will then swipe them from the side and start a new round, with everyone drawing again. Boba Bonanza feels very quick and the more players that you have the more hectic everything becomes. There are also two special cards to add more to the mix; a Blast It card that can cause all other players to scramble to put their hand on the Blast Card, with the last player to do so needing to discard their entire hand and start over. Wild cards work as any colored card, but you cannot use more than one Wild Card to complete a set of boba cards – which is the goal of the game. Once someone has eight duplicate cards, an entire order of Boba, placing them down to complete the game.
Robin really got into Boba Bonanza, but with her age was often just grabbing and throwing cards seemingly at random! I am not sure if strategy is something to keep in mind, so Amelia ended up being very good at understanding what to keep and how to organise. We all agreed the art and cards were super cute and that we found this to be such a fun card game. The rounds themselves are often short, as is the whole game, so it’s perfect for smaller blocks of family time.