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So far in this little series I’ve reviewed a very geeky, complex game that draws from the lore of H.P. Lovecraft (Arkham Horror) and a worker placement European style game that draws from the lore of Dungeons and Dragons (Lords of Waterdeep). If you’re able to get your non-geeky friends into Arkham Horror then good on you. The rules are dense, gameplay is very fiddly and there’s a lot of text to read through each and every time you play. Lords of Waterdeep might be an easier sell once you establish that the mechanics are pretty simple and that no knowledge of D&D is necessary.

However, if you’re trying to build up a gaming group that’s less than open minded about geeky intellectual properties and wants something a little more approachable, you might need to set your sights a little lower.

Like it or not, a lot of people still think Scrabble and Monopoly when they hear that you’re organizing a game night. But it’s 2015 and limiting yourself to the Hasbro/Parker Brothers offerings is for suckers. If you ever want to get people into the more interesting games I would personally recommend starting small. Possibly with a card game they’ve never heard of. It’s a much smaller step to get someone to play a simple little game they’ve never played before than it is to drop a 20 page rulebook on their heads and hope for the best.

Enter a game like The Game. Ignore the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to ever Google this game for obvious reasons (pro tip, add “IDW” into your search if you’re looking for an English copy, the publisher is supposed to be bringing The Game to North America this month). If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere that picks up foreign copies of board games I can vouch for the fact that there’s no text on the cards whatsoever. So, as you might be able to see in that picture I’m holding a French copy from publisher OYA. I found an English copy of the rules from the original publisher NSV and I was on my way. So if you can find a copy in some other language, you can easily pick it up without worry.

So now I’m playing The Game.

Basically, the game is simple enough: The Game is made up of 102 cards. 4 “row cards” (2 counting up from 1 and 2 counting down from 100) and 98 number cards from 2 to 99. You can play with probably any number of people up to around 5 or 6 I would think pretty easily, and you can even play by yourself (though it would be pretty damn boring). You lay out the 4 Row Cards and then each player in turn plays 2 or more cards onto each pile. On the 1-UP piles you can only count ascending and on the 100-DOWN piles you can only play descending. All the while you can’t really give too much away about what’s in your hand.

So that means that if my good buddy Walter plays a 14 and a 12 on the ascending piles, and I’m holding a 9, I’ll have to hold onto that 9 until one of the two descending piles gets low enough to make playing a 9 feasible. The only exception is if my card is exactly a difference of 10 from the pile (say, a 19 is played on the ascending pile). In that case I can play the 9 and pull the ascending pile down 10 points, opening up play for the 10 and 11 that Walter also cut off.

If this sounds pretty easy, it is. At least, the gameplay is pretty easy. Depending on how strictly you enforce what is allowable communication the game can also get pretty easy. I don’t know if we’re either very good or just way too lenient on how much we let slide in the table-talk area but both of our initial playthroughs (with 4 people who had never played before) we had 3 or 1 card left at the end of the game. According to the rules anything under 10 cards left to play is a pretty good result. Mind you, that included things from Sarah like “I have the highest of the 80s so don’t play in that pile.”

Much like any cooperative game you can obviously enforce the rules as loosely or as strictly as you want to, which is fun since it kind of allows you to cater to how casual the group is.

Side note: I have no idea what the terrifying skull motif of The Game is all about, I mean, I guess you go with whatever works but it really has nothing to do with being scary at all. Although, we did keep saying “If you die in The Game, you die for real!” We probably would not have been spouting off that hilarious horror trope if spooky skulls didn’t feature prominently on all the cards.

So how geeky is this? Not very at all. Extremely low-grade geekiness. The only thing remotely geeky about it is that it doesn’t come from a mainstream North American game publisher. And that hardly even qualifies as geeky anymore.

How does it serve as a gateway to geekier things? It’s a pretty good icebreaker for the non-gaming crowd. It’s easy to pick up and pretty fun to play. It also might be easier to get people interested in a cooperative game since the competitive nature of lots of games can be off putting for a lot of non-gamers. The idea of cooperative games in the first place can be a little foreigh for someone who is only familiar with Sorry! and Yahtzee. Who knows, it might be easier to sell someone on Arkham Horror if they’ve had a few fun rounds of The Game under their belt.

Honestly, I had picked up Hanabi before buying The Game and I personally enjoy Hanabi more. They’re both in similar veins (I’ll review Hanabi one of these days for sure) but The Game is little less stressful (despite the skulls) and a little easier to play casually. For the 10-15$ price tag I think it’s a pretty risk-free purchase that you can easily introduce to your more casual friends to get them into boardgaming and also have some fun with your more serious crew. The Game easily plays in under 30 minutes so is a prime candidate to play around with while waiting for the rest of the gaming group to show up.

Oh, English rules here.

Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.