CMYK, the publishers of tabletop games like Daybreak and Wilmot’s Warehouse, has just released the first four titles in their Magenta line. These card games come in hot pink boxes the size of a hefty hardcover and are quite eye-catching on your shelves, particularly as a set. I’ll be working on more detailed reviews of the individual games, but here’s a quick overview.
The box covers, sans slipcovers: Fruit Fight, Figment, Duos, and Fives. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The four titles are Fruit Fight, Figment, Duos, and Fives. All of the titles in the Magenta line are card games and tend to be on the lighter side in terms of complexity, and CMYK plans to add more games to the line in the future.
Box interior for Fives. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
All of the games come in the same size box, with a flat lid that opens like a book cover, and the aforementioned brightly colored slipcase. The slipcases have a window on the “spine” and the cover, allowing a little bit of each game’s unique cover art to peek through. The lid of the box has a folder that holds the rulebook. The inserts in the boxes are paper-based instead of plastic, and in fact there are no plastic components inside the box at all; two of the games have cardboard tokens that come in a little paper bag, and the cards are wrapped with a paper strip instead of plastic. For most of the games, the box is a bit larger than it really needs to be — Fives and Fruit Fight are literally a deck of cards — so your tolerance for the wasted space may depend on how much you like the uniform size and appearance. I think they look pretty sharp, but I also have a large game collection and prefer my game boxes to be as efficiently packed as possible.
Left to right: standard Bicycle card, Fruit Fight, Duos, Fives, and Figment. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Some of the games have larger cards than others, but all of them are larger than standard playing cards. Fives, Duos, and Fruit Fight all have the slightly-bigger cards, and Figment has cards that are closer to tarot-sized. While I liked the feel of the cards, I did find that they tended to clump a little bit when shuffling.
Two bananas — bust! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Fruit Fight was designed by Reiner Knizia (the only one who has his name on the box cover), and is a press-your-luck game where you’re flipping over fruit cards and collecting as many as you can to score points. However, if you flip two of the same fruit, you bust and lose everything from that turn. The other twist is that you don’t put your fruits into your scoring pile until the beginning of your next turn, because everyone else has a chance to steal them first. It’s quick and simple, and I like the player interaction when deciding whether to steal or not.
Did I get these in the correct order from least to most green?* Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Figment was designed by Wolfgang Warsch, and is a cooperative spin on his 2018 game Illusion. The cards have various abstract shapes and patterns on them in four colors (blue, green, pink, silver), and you are trying to put cards in the right order based on how much of a particular color is present on the card. Some comparisons are obvious, but can you tell the difference between a card that is 23% green with one that is 25% green?
Collect the right number cards to fulfill your goals. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Duos is a team-based game designed by Johannes Schmidauer-König for 4 or 6 players. Players are trying to complete goals to score points — things like “collect 3 cards of the same number” or “collect 4 blue odd numbers.” Each turn, you’re able to take some cards and pass some cards to your partner, but communication is limited so you need to pay attention to everyone’s goals and what cards they’re picking up.
Fives — where any card can be a magenta 5. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Fives is a trick-taking game designed by Taiki Shinzawa that was originally published in Japan as The Green Fivura (but has been recolored to magenta for this line). The wacky twist is that every card has the magenta 5 on the back, so you can play a card face-down instead of as its real value and color. You also have to be careful how many tricks you win each round, because you want the sum of your winning cards to be as close to 25 as possible without going over.
Very bright slipcovers! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
All of the Magenta games are available directly from CMYK for $24.99 each.
*No, I made multiple errors in the green line-up!
Disclosure: GeekDad received copies of these titles for review.
