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Cost: $10
From: Looney Laboratories
Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Type of game: Card
Skill level: 2
Complexity: 2
Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 19, Summer/Fall/Winter 1998
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Looney Labs seems to be building itself a reputation for ultralight card games with more luck than strategy. Last year’s Fluxx was a success, so who can blame them for trying to strike it big again? Sadly, though, with Aquarius they’ve gone back to the well once too often.
Aquarius is essentially a tile-laying game with cards. The meat of the deck are cards depicting, in 60’s psychedelic style, 1-4 of the five elements (earth, air, fire, water, and ether). When multiple elements appear on the same card, the card is tiled so that each element is contained in its own quadrant or half of the card. Players are secretly assigned one of the five elements at random. The object is to form an unbroken chain of your assigned element spanning seven or more cards.
Turns are simple: draw one, play one. Element cards are played like dominoes, each placed so that at least one element on each touching edge matches up with each other. Also mixed into the deck are action cards which can be played instead of an element card. These allow players to trade hands, trade assigned elements, move a card already in play, or remove a card from the tableau completely.
So why doesn’t Aquarius work? The designer mixed his metaphors. The tile-laying aspect of the game evokes the feel of a tactical game. Players seek to form long-term strategies, setting up multiple paths to victory and hemming in opponents. The action cards in Aquarius completely bugger such planning. The worst offenders are the cards which allow players to trade their assigned elements, effecting yanking all of a player’s work out from under him. Does anyone really think it’s fun to spend a game executing a strategy only to have someone steal everything they’ve accomplished? This is the same gripe I have with The Doonesbury Game, which forces players to trade scores periodically. Why bother trying to win at all if someone can effective trade places with you just before you win? This kind of mechanic works OK in Fluxx because that’s all there is to the game- there’s no other level sending misleading messages. It’s all fluff. But Aquarius pretends to something a little deeper and then sabotages itself with the action cards. And by the way, why didn’t they put the name of the game on the sides of the box? Don’t they know people stack these things?
Fluffy games have their place, but married to a tactical system isn’t it. All of the cardplay in Aquarius winds up being functionally equivalent to just rolling the die to determine a winner. Which makes Aquarius a big bummer, man.