CLEVER: The Card Game, A Review

I have something of a hobby backing things on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It's fun: you find something that you'd like to see exist, and pledge some money toward helping to create it. Then you wait. While you're waiting, the creators keep you posted on their progress. You get to hear about them checking out prototypes, visiting factories, making revisions. And when their project goes into production, you get to celebrate with them and possibly be one of the first people ever to get one. If their product never goes into production beyond the initial Kickstarter run, this may be your only chance to own something interesting and rare.

The first project I supported at Kickstarter, back in 2012, was a base for Mindstorms robotics that has different holes that are compatible with the various Mindstorms connectors. It has proven to be very useful when building small mechanisms that are meant to stay in place. The Lego Savant and I recently used it when building a simple belt driver to turn his Leonard da Vinci helicopter model. You can see the gray Minutebot base holding the Mindstorms brick in place:

Our most recent Kickstarter arrival is a card game called CLEVER. More accurately, it's a unique deck of 74 cards that can be used to play a number of games.

The packaging and cards are high-quality and nicely designed. Here is the box for the game:

And this is what it looks like when you open it:

The instruction booklet was on top, and under it is the deck itself, in a card box tucked into the center of a frame that lists people who contributed $50 or more.

Here is a not very exciting picture of the card box itself:

It's perfectly nice, but probably the least impressive bit of design associated with this project. I pledged enough to get two copies of the game, one for us and one to give away, and the card box for our copy had come unglued in transit. The gift copy was fine, though.

Here are some sample cards:

These are just lovely, and they're a very high-quality plastic that I expect to hold up well. These cards have a lot going on. Each one has a number or letter; each of the digits from 0-9 and each of the letters of the alphabet appears twice. Each card is also associated with a color. There are twelve colors in all, and we really appreciate that the names of the colors are printed on the cards. Not only have we found the blue to be a bit purply and the tan to be a bit on the brownish-green side, but I have two kids who are color blind. There are games we've struggled to play because the kids can't distinguish between similar colors. It's helpful to be able to read the color names.

In addition, each card belongs to one of twelve categories: balls, birds, body parts, electric appliances, fruit, and so on. Here's the key that appears in the instruction booklet:

Cards can be grouped by any of their various relationships. You might have three blue things, or three vegetables, for instance. In addition, you can group letter cards by alphabetical sequence (MNO) or by spelling words like CAT or DRY. Number cards can be grouped by sequence or by forming simple equations, for instance with a 5, a 2, and a 7. In some games, it's also possible to match a pair of cards that have the same number or letter.

My older two and I have already spent some time playing a game called called Three, which starts with three cards face-up on the table. These cards are random, and they may not be related at all, or two of them may be related in some way, or all three. Players take turns adding a single card to one of the three stacks, preserving the number of related cards. If you started with two related cards, you only need to play a card that relates to at least one other. But if you started with three, you have to play a card that keeps all three cards related.

We quickly modified the rules of this game so that if the original three cards weren't related at all, three new random cards were played on top of them. We found that preserving "zero or more" related cards removed any challenge from the game, and it quickly became tedious.

We want to try some variations on Three. For instance, it might be fun to try "maintain exactly the same number of cards in relationship" rather than "the same number or more." It might be a fun challenge to have to play cards that preserve the lack of relationships if you start at zero. We have several ideas.

We are also interested in thinking about creating a game where you build a collection of as many related cards as possible.

Today, my almost-seven year old and I played a game that required matching only two cards at a time. He grasped the concept very quickly, but argued about some of the categories. Hummingbirds and dragonflies are both small flying things, for example, so why can't they make a pair? And why can't a fan and a van be a pair, because they rhyme? We stuck to the rule book today, but I expect we'll try playing with looser rules sometime and see what happens.

CLEVER reminds me of SET, another game in which there are multiple ways that cards can relate to each other. We love SET, but CLEVER feels more like the kind of card deck it would be handy to keep in the bottom of your parent-bag to pull out whenever there are kids to be entertained. Very simple matching games could be set up for young children, whereas rummy-style games and more complex puzzle games can be played with older kids and adults.

My three kids, who are 13, 10, and 7, all give the game high marks. And so do I. It's very well-designed both conceptually and graphically, we've already had a lot of fun with it, and it complicates the traditional card deck in ways that we find both fun and challenging.