SBG Editions are best known for their strategy card names, including Battle Mages and Cursed Empire, so Sasha Jelten's Card Sharks is something of a departure: Card Sharks is a real-time game that combines dexterity with arithmetic agility.
Card Sharks is subtitled 'Let the Feeding Frenzy Begin' and Feeding Frenzy rather accurately sums up the manic play in this 2-6 player game - especially at higher player counts. You're collectively rolling a pool of coloured dice and each round there will be a different scoring card that sets out which dice combinations score 1, 2 or 3 points: for example, having three dice with equal numbers, or three dice of different colours, or dice that have the highest total value. Players each have three Shark cards and as soon as the dice have been rolled, your Sharks go into a feeding frenzy as players take their Shark cards one at a time and slide them under a die to 'eat' it. Once fed, the card is left where it is on the table and you grab your next Shark card to 'eat' another die. If you accidentally scoop up more than one die you'll have to jiggle your card until there's just one die left on it.
Adding to the frenzy, you are in a race against the other players to feed all three of your Sharks. As soon as all three of your Sharks are fed, you call out 'Chomp!' and you additionally score a point for each of the other players whose Sharks are still feeding.
At the highest player counts you're likely to score more points for being first to call 'Chomp!' than you'll get for meeting the scoring card requirements so we found that with six players everyone focused solely on trying to quickly nab any dice and hope for a surendipitous card score by way of a bonus. In a two- or three-player game, where there was at best just 2 'Chomp' points on offer, players were more deliberative about going for dice that met at least two or three of the requirements of the scoring card for the round.
Card Sharks is played as a race to be first to 20 points, so regardless of player count a game is likely to run to just three or four swift rounds - making this a fun, frenzied 10-15 minute filler. It's a game that children and adults can play together and at least some of the scoring cards can be considered educational because they encourage some simple but quick arithmetic.
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