The second part of the computer/board game series is on indefinite hiatus until my ennui is dispelled.

I played Sequence, which is new (to me) last night. It’s a mainstream commercial board game that you can get at Target. The board is made up of a large (10×10) grid of playing cards, which are laid out in a semi-regular manner. (The card images are shrunk, so the size is reasonable.) There are no jacks, though, and the corners are wild. The game ships with an ordinary double deck of playing cards. On your turn, you play a card from your hand (hand size depends on the number of players), place a token on a corresponding space on the board, and draw a replacement card. The idea is to make a run of 5 markers in a row (the Sequence from which the game derives its name).

The game is fun and exciting enough, although it’s kind of light on strategy because you don’t have many options—only one card changes every turn—and it’s very unlikely that the order you play your cards in will actually matter. To me, a bigger turnoff was the jacks. Jacks are wild; one-eyed jacks allow you to remove any enemy marker, while two-eyed jacks allow you to place a marker on any space. Both, of course, are devastatingly powerful. The two-eyed jacks make finishing a sequence trivial when you might ordinarily have to wait a long time for the card you need; the one-eyed jacks let you ruin your opponent’s formations, and the damage is almost impossible to repair, because the card that allowed the marker to be played in the first place is gone!

The jacks are so powerful that it’s almost impossible the player who gets the most not to win the game. It’s infuriating to draw no jacks while your opponent gets a bunch and gets to do whatever s/he wants, and winning because you drew a couple at the right time isn’t very satisfying either. The huge arbitrary element introduced by these is a big turnoff for me, which is why I’ll be advocating for the following house rules the next time I play:

• All jacks can be used either to play or remove a marker, but only for their own suit.
• You can’t use a jack to finish a Sequence.

Hopefully, these rules will make the use of jacks more interesting, instead of just “save them until you have enough to win.”

(There’s also a team game, which I’d like to try. Teams share markers but aren’t allowed table talk. I assume this is to keep the game moving, but it seems strange.)