Jeroen Geenen's Carnival has every appearance of being a children's game. It has colourful cartoon art, it's published by Brain Games, who've published a stable of children's and family games over the years, and it says on the box it's for age 7+. There's nothing in this small box card game that makes it in any way unsuitable as a children's game but from our plays at Board's Eye View we reckon it's a game that adults will enjoy and get more out of than children. It's a set collection card game that calls for a good memory and it can involve a degree of 'take that' card play, so children as young as 7 may struggle with it.
The game takes 2-6 players. It uses a deck of 70 'creature cards' in five suits/colours, so that for each suit the unfilleted deck comprises two of each card numbered 1-6 and two minus value cards. You only play with a full deck if you have six players, otherwise a number of cards are randomly removed from the shuffled deck to reflect the number of players. Turns are simple: you draw a card and you play a card from your hand either to a tableau in front of you where you'll stack cards by suit so that you and the other players can see the total value in each suit, or to another player's tableau, or to the discard pile. Getting back to the theme, the discard pile represents the carnival and your tableau represents the audience.
Players will always have at least one mask card. This is played along with another card in order to conceal it. Masked cards can be played to your own or another player's tableau or to the discard pile.
When the draw deck is exhausted, you lay out all the cards in the discard pile and count up the total value for each suit, including masked cards. You score for a suit only if that suit's total in the discard pile is greater than the total in your tableau.
You're not allowed to peek at the cards in the discard pile or at any of the masked cards, even if they are cards you played yourself. This makes Carnival quite a demanding memory game. You have to try to keep a running total in mind of what cards are in the discard pile and make deductions about what cards might be concealed behind a mask. You're also having to do a continuous mental comparison of how your tableau totals compare with those in the discards; and likewise with the tableaus of other players. For every card you play you need to weigh up whether it's best to add it to your tableau or whether that risks pushing your audience over that suit's total for the carnival display. Likewise, playing cards to another player's tableau can sabotage their scoring: it may have a jolly theme but Carnival is definitely a 'take that' game.
We've played Carnival as a family game but we've enjoyed it most as a cutthroat games night filler played between highly competitive seasoned gamers.