Escalation

It's the classic suburban conflict of unreturned tools, loud neighbors, and prize-winning garden gnomes from Reiner Knizia. This simple gateway card game has players starting with low-value cards then escalating the values until someone goes too far and penalizes their neighbor with the stack of cards. When the deck runs out and a player's hand is empty, the player with the least cards in his stack wins.

One player opens with a card or cards and calls out the value played. The next player must play cards to surpass that value, and so on, escalating the value until the point where a player does not wish to or cannot go above that value, thus taking the stack of cards and placing them in her penalty stack. A simple card game in the tradition of No Thanks!

No. of players: 2-6

Ages: 10 +

Playing time: 15 minutes