Review: Poo! the Card Game

[note_box] Today we’ve got a special guest post from a friend of mine. When we hit up a FLGS on FreeRPG Day we walked away with a few games too, one of which was Poo and Jeremy here was kind enough to write up a review of the game. He may have some more articles here in the near future so be sure to say hello, you can also follow him on twitter: @DudeCool03 [/note_box]

Good Dirty Fun

This game isn’t trying to hide anything with the title. It’s all about playing as a monkey and flinging poo at each other! How does that not sound like fun? The game is for two-eight players but its best with more people. With only two people I would not recommend nearly as much,  it’s is just not that engaging and kind of boring. The more people you have to play,  the more fun you will have. The goal of the game is to be the last monkey standing, once a player reaches fifteen poo counters they are out of the game (although there is one exception to that rule that will be discussed later).

In the game of Poo there are five different types of cards. Poo and special poo cards, defense cards, mishap cards, clean cards, and event cards. On your turn you can play a card from your hand, there are some cards that allow you to play more than one card on your turn as well as some other abilities, which are always explained right on the card. If you do not wish to play a card on your turn you can choose to discard any number of cards from your hand and draw back up to the hand size of five cards. There are two types of cards you can play when it is not your turn – defense, and mishap cards. To give you an idea of what each card does, here is a small chart explaining what they do:

• Poo cards – Allows you to throw poo at one opponent. Damage varies from one to seven poo.
• Special Poo cards – Lets you do many different things depending on what the card says. Some let you use two poo cards at once, others do damage to every opponent, etc.
• Defense cards – These cards can make someones attack miss, or some of them have you grab a buddy and make them take the damage instead of you.
• Mishap cards – There are a lot of different versions of these but you play these when someone throws poo at you so that something bad happens to the person attacking.
• Clean cards – You get to clean poo off of yourself and sometimes give it to other people instead because sharing is caring!
• Event cards – These are probably the most unique and hard to describe cards in the game. Some of the cards put other creatures in the game that must be killed before others can be attacked. Another card makes it impossible for anyone to attack or it can cause an attack to be unblock-able. Along with many other cards with different abilities.

Poo Fast Poo Furious

This game is very fast paced, the average time of a game is around 5-15 minutes. Larger games do tend to run a little longer but otherwise it doesn’t take long to run a game. In the rules it specifies that you only have five seconds to make a decision on your turn or you will be skipped. Depending on the people you play with you may want to be a little reasonable on this rule because I have had instances where people took it way too serious and it wasn’t much fun. Also to keep the pace flowing whenever you play a card, even if it is not your turn, you immediately draw back up to five cards. If you happen to run out of cards in the draw pile you will need to go through the discard pile and remove every clean card from it. Any clean cards in your hand can still be played after this occurs but once played it is removed from the game. This does a good job of keeping the game moving along and finishing fast.

Earlier I mentioned that there was an exception to the rule of once you reach fifteen poo and you’re out. The exception to that is the “Golden Banana” cards. In games with 2-4 players you use one golden banana card, in games with 5+ you use both golden banana cards. The way this card works is that the first person to reach fifteen poo counters allows them to pick up the golden banana card and re-enter the game with 8 poo counters. If the person that takes the first golden banana card goes out of the game again and there is still a golden banana card left they can take the second card as well. Once both of them are gone then everyone that gets knocked out is out for the remainder of the game.

One personal exception to this card I’ve made is that in two player games it seems like using a golden banana card isn’t worth it and just makes the game drag out for no good reason. I feel it should just be a poo-duel in a two player match and first person to fifteen poos is out of the game and loses.

Let It Hit The Fan

Overall I think this game is very fun, it moves along at a very good pace especially if everyone is involved at all times. The artwork on the cards is extremely entertaining to look at, and the text on the cards is bound to make you laugh. Especially if you find Poo to be as funny as I did. Its not great for smaller children as the cards need to be read in order to know what to do but the box says eight and up is a good age group. Even though its not great for smaller children it can still be a good game for families as there is nothing about the game that is too vulgar, just poo. Plus children (and classy adults) often find toilet humor hilarious! I picked this up at a local comic shop for around $10 bucks. It is available on amazon for $9 with free super-save shipping if you spend more than 25$ (maybe pick up Death Angel while you’re at it?). Definitely worth checking out! Have fun flinging some poo!