I had no idea what I was going to write about today until Nathan pointed me to this comic.

(Further links are to http://www.pagat.com, an excellent reference for classic card games (anything played with an ordinary 52-card deck).

Repackaging classic games isn’t a new idea, of course. In the realm of children’s/family games, Uno is just Crazy Eights with special rules given to the face cards (and a couple extra wild cards, to be fair.) Skip-Bo is essentially the same as Spite and Malice. Phase 10 doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do with an ordinary deck and some variant Rummy rules, andif you go to the card games rack in a toy store or K-mart, you can find any number of repackagings of Old Maid, Go Fish, and other children’s games. The Great Dalmuti is essentially the same game as President/Asshole, although the deck is a little different.

One of my favorite games of this type is Wizard, a commercial repackaging of Oh Hell. It has a couple of additional features I really like. One is extra wild cards, which can be played out of suit and help you feel more in control of the flow of the hand. The other is an improved scoring system which rewards you for taking tricks (since it’s generally easier to try to lose tricks than to win them) and also rewards you for getting as close as possible to your bid, rather than going crazy and trying to screw everyone else as soon as you know you won’t make it.

It’s not limited to card games—Looney Labs’ game Are You A Werewolf? is just a set of rules for the classic parlor game more commonly known as Mafia, along with a nicely illustrated set of role cards. And this very blog has spawned Cabal, which is just a simplification of Clue.

I don’t want to seem dismissive of these games, because both the originals and repackaged versions can be fun to play (especially Wizard!). In fact, the addition of a theme can be very useful for introducing a game to new players. The importance of a theme to a game will be the topic of a later article…

By the way, the long-awaited PC game Oblivion is released tomorrow. If the articles Tuesday and Thursday are perfunctory, you’ll know why…