As the saying goes, 'One man's trash is another man's treasure', and that's the philosophy behind Miroslav Garigov's family-friendly set collection card game, published by Nastola. It's not clear how or why plums have been transformed into treasure; we suspect it must be the result of a pun that works in Bulgarian. However, the premise of the game is that the 2-6 players are collecting and sorting waste so that they can exchange it for plums, with the win going to the player who has accumulated the most plums over the course of the game.
Each player has a set of four containers for the four types of trash: glass, plastic, paper and organic waste. Each turn you'll be drawing two cards and keeping one, which you'll allocate to its appropriate trash bin. In keeping with the game's theme, however, there's no neat draw pile. Instead, the face-down cards are scattered in a heap in the centre of the table, in a convincing board game representation of a landfill dump. When it's your turn, you turn over any two face-down cards from the landfill, take one and flip the other back over. That adds an element of Pelmanism into the game: like those children's 'picking up doubles' memory games, you'll be at an advantage of you can remember the location of a card you're after.
There's a small deck of 15 plum cards, and the top four cards of the deck are displayed to create the market. Each plum card shows the mix of waste needed to exchange for its value in plums. Once you've collected the requisite mix of sorted trash, you can exchange it for plums and take the applicable plum card. The game ends when all the plum cards are gone.
Just under a third of the cards in the landfill dump are 'special cards' rather than waste cards. These add a bit of variety to the game and a modicum of 'take that' interaction: 'Magnet' lets you take a card from another player's container; 'Mess' requires all the other players to tip a card from one of their containers back into the landfill; 'Exchange' lets you force a card swap. In addition, 'Bonus' lets you take two cards from landfill rather than just the one and 'Extra Plum' gives you - you guessed it - an extra plum.
This all makes for a light easy-to-play family game. And it's one with an educational and evangelical ecological bent: the waste cards are all littered with informative facts to encourage recycling. Tho' Plums for Trash isn't a trivia game, you'll still be bound to learn as you play.