This review of Push was featured on Episode 78 of The Five By. Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Ingenious, Deep Space D-6, Vindication and Legendary Encounters: Alien.
At first glance, Push looks like an Uno deck. And for full disclosure, Push was a giveaway at BGG 2018, and I didn’t pick it up because it looked very similar to an Uno deck. At the risk of sounding like a board-game snob here, I’m definitely not playing Uno with you. There are plenty of better card games out there, for even the most inexperienced gamers.
It wasn’t until about 6 months later that someone introduced me to Push, and I enjoyed it so much that I immediately purchased a copy. Push, a short card game published by Ravensburger and designed by Prospero Hall, is a game I often travel with because it’s essentially a thick deck of cards and one 6-sided die.
This 25-minute game works well with a midsize group of 2-6, and I love busting it out with new and older gamers alike. The deck has cards ranging from 1 to 6, in five different colors, as well as Switch cards and Roll cards, which I’ll explain later what they do.
The three types of cards in Push — and that very mean die.
On your turn, you draw one card at a time from the deck until you want to stop or you bust! When you draw a card, you must play them into one of three stacks in the middle of the table. The rules for placement in the stacks is that you cannot have the same number or same color in any of the stacks. If there’s a blue 2 already face-up in the center in one stack, you cannot place a 2 of any other color or another blue card into that same stack. As the active player, it’s up to you how you want to build out those stacks. You can even keep them all in one stack if you follow the rules of placement correctly.
The stacks are important because each card contains victory points based on the number on it. If you decide to stop before busting, you select any one of those stacks in play and sort them into your bench in front of you by color. The next person to your left grabs the second stack if there is one, and so forth.
The Switch cards that are drawn during this player’s turn change the direction of who picks the stacks next. Instead of the stack selection going to the player on your left, it now goes to the player to the right and so forth. Switch cards aren’t placed into stacks either; they’re just shown on the side for reference during that active player’s turn.
Cards on your bench as worth victory points at the end of the game. They are, however, not completely safe from the dreaded Push die. If the active player draws a Roll card, they must place it into one of the stacks that already doesn’t have one in it. Roll cards also follow the placement rules like all the other cards.
Which stack do you want? Are you willing to push your luck?
When a player grabs a stack with a roll card in it, they must roll the 6-sided die. Each side of the die has exactly one color on it, and then a black square. Whatever side the die lands, the player loses all of those matching colored cards from their bench. It’s quite devastating when you lose a bunch of points this way! If you roll the black die, all your cards are safe — for the time being.
Also, if you keep drawing and flip over a card that you cannot place, you bust. You also roll the die and you don’t get to pick up a stack. Instead, the next person gets first choice.
Lastly, on your turn, you can choose not to draw cards but instead bank one pile of your colored stacks. If you decide to do this, you flip over those cards and then it’s the next person’s turn. All those cards you’ve flipped over will be safe from the dreaded Push die.
Might be a good idea to bank this yellow pile in your bench on a future turn!
Game play continues until you finish the entire deck. Players calculate their VPs based on the cards that are both in their bench and those banked faced down, and the person with the most VPs wins the game.
For non-heavy gamers, I like to play a variant I created for this game. Instead of placing the Roll card into one of the stacks in front of you on your turn, the active player just rolls the die and faces the consequences. That sense of impending doom adds to the experience, as everyone can relate to that Jack in the Box feeling of will this next card wipe out the 12 points of Red cards you have sitting in front of you. Why, yes, it will. It most definitely will. I like to reserve the option of placing the Roll card into a pile for more experienced gamers.
Even though this looks like Uno, it’s nothing like that game! Push is actually fun!
Push is perfect for a chill night with friends, whether you’re gathering around the bar or dining table chatting. It has a very small footprint so it’s easy to transport. It unfortunately isn’t very color blind friendly, as there aren’t any symbols on the cards to differentiate the various colors.
Other than that, it’s a fun game that is easy to jump into and create lots of laughter and merriment when you egg on the active player by saying, no, no, there’s no way you’re going to bust. And then they do!
And that’s Push! This is Meeple Lady for The Five By. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as Meeple Lady, or on my website boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening! Bye!
I initially was unsure if I was going to be able to attend the inaugural Dice Tower West convention due to the impending birth of my niece, but when I found out she wasn’t going to make an appearance until after the convention, I decided to make a quick stop to Las Vegas.
I arrived just after midnight on Thursday night, enough to basically head over to the Westgate Resort (the former Hilton on the north side of the Strip for those familiar with Vegas) and go to bed so that I could hit the ground running that morning. I had a list of four games I wanted to play, and ended up playing three of them, so I was pleased with myself. They were Captains of the Gulf, Wingspan, Forum Trajanum and Passing Through Petra.
Ran into Suzanne and Mandi of the Dice Tower first thing on Friday morning. These ladies are truly inspirational and bring so much to the hobby.
I checked in Friday morning and received a super cool swag bag with the Dice Tower West logo on it. Inside was a free game, a Dice Tower Pin and Dice Tower dice. I also liked that the lanyards were of the thick variety, so that I could decorate it with my Meeple Lady pin as well as all the cool flair I’ve collected from various conventions. Dice Tower West had a decent library, and I particularly enjoyed the section on the convention floor that featured large games like Giant Azul!
Squeee! Look at this Giant Azul! You definitely will not mistake the pieces for Starbursts.
My first game of the day was Captains of the Gulf. @boardgamegeekCA taught me this game, designed by @jasondingr and on my list of to-play games, which is about fishing in the Gulf. The game has multi-use cards and a rondel for actions, which can affect the pacing of game. It has a very Glory To Rome feel to it, where the strength of your actions are based on various upgrades or licenses you have on your fishing boat. And man, overfishing the Gulf has some negative consequences, which made our game resource poor toward the second half. And as I’ve mentioned before, I love how Jason designed this game in honor of his grandfather who was a fisherman in the Gulf. Had a great time playing this!
I was so happy I got a chance to play Captains of the Gulf!
Next up was a bird-themed card game that was surprisingly a little mathy: Piepmatz. @Nettersplays taught this game, in which you’re trying to match sets of birds and collect the most seeds from the bird feeder.
It’s me and the lovely @Nettersplays!
Sounds simple, right? Well, you have to play stronger birds than what’s displayed in the main tableau, which then you’ll receive into your personal tableau the bird you just knocked out, all the while avoiding squirrels and crows. Nobody likes these guys because they will take your cards! The mathy part comes from playing certain cards to overtake the birds in the middle tableau while avoiding the predators.
Piedmatz is not the only bird-themed game I played this at this convention.
I then played a game of Push, which is a fun, quick push-your-luck game that I regret not picking up at BGG Con last year when it was offered as convention swag. I do love push-your-luck games and egging others on by saying, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, you can lose all your points in one particular color! You keep drawing cards and placing them however you want into three columns, with none of the same color or number in each column. If you can’t place a card, you bust. If you don’t bust, you can pick up one of the columns for points, and the next player takes the second column, and so forth. There’s also a card that forces you to roll a color-sided die, and if that color pops up, you lose your entire stash in that color.
Push is a fun push-your-luck card game that anyone can play. It’s a much better Uno.
I then played The Estates. Played it for the first time back at BGG Con, and I most enjoy screwing people over in the game! It’s super cut-throat bidding on blocks, developing the streets and building high-rises.
The bidding in The Estates is so tense and brutal!
Next up was Obsession: Pride, Intrigue and Prejudice set in Victorian England, a deck-builder and worker management game, which was super neat. This particular theme is usually reserved for lighter games and/or card games, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a substantial game set in this era, which, if we’re splitting hairs, the Jane Austen books were actually set in the Regency era, but I digress. I had never heard of this game before so I was happy that @erykmynn taught it to me!
These dapper dudes would probably be fun at your party!
You build your deck of fancy ladies and gents, and sometimes the occasional selfish cad who will just ruin your parties! Each turn, you choose to host an event and play the matching cards from your deck and worker meeples to activate the location and/or the cards, and gain resources. The cool thing about this game is that in addition to managing your deck, you’re also managing your worker meeples as they rest up one round until they’re available again. Unless you spend your turn and reset, in which case, all your cards and workers are available again.
These workers are so exhausted from working your events that they need to rest for one round.
After dinner, which we then discovered our hotel rooms varied WILDLY, we hung out in our friend’s room, which had THREE BATHROOMS. Oh, and a pool table, vintage Playball pinball machine and decor that immediately sends you back to your grandma’s basement.
In case you were wondering what it was like to party in the 1970s.
We played a quick game of Push, and then we launched into my favorite game of the whole convention: Wingspan. Oh. My. Goodness. This game is so darling! It’s a lighter game than I usually would bring to a table, but man, HAVE YOU SEEN THESE EGGS? it’s a chill, short engine builder with gorgeous artwork, and I’m so happy that Netters taught this game to me.
Wingspan is just darling. I can’t wait until I get my copy!
The game plays over four rounds, with objectives that’ll score each round, and you use your allotted set of action cubes to play bird cards on different terrains, collect resources, lay eggs or gain more cards. As you build out on you tableau, when you activate that row next time, you’ll get to activate each card that’s already placed in that row. Bird cards come in various VPs and abilities, and the whole game is just delightful to play.
I love the scientific look of the cards, especially with all the information on these birds.
Next up, I played Mayday! Mayday! It’s a 45-minute drawn-out hidden-role in which good and evil players are trying to make their way into an airplane cockpit. The first group will take 4, and then it gets whittled down to 2, and then one last vote. Each player has three cards, and if you have more broken hearts than whole hearts, you’re a bad guy. I pretty much laid low the entire time and refused entry anyone because I was suspicious with everyone! And guess what? Us baddies won. Woot!
GloryHoundd, Dr. GloryHogg and I are the best cylons ever.
After that, I entered exactly one round of Just Two, a variation that @whatseplaying created using two sets of the game Just One. Instead of writing clues for one word, there’s two words in play, and the rest of the folks just get to pick whichever one they want to give a clue to. Per the usual rules, when two clues match, they’re discarded, and the guesses has a chance to look at the leftover clues. Epic, especially when the guesser picked the correct two words!
We all then went grabbed a nightcap at the casino bar at 2 a.m. and hung out for an hour or so. Good times with all these fun people!
Drannnkkksss with all these cool people!
I began early Saturday with a mind-melting game of Forum Trajanum. My buddy Karlo, who I had met when he lived in Phoenix for a brief period, taught one of the new games from Stefan Feld. Players are working together to build a monument on the main board, while developing their own Colonia on their player board.
Forum Trajanum is one of Stefan Feld’s newest games and it’s super heavy!
The cool mechanism in this game is that you remove two action chits on your player board, pick one and give the second one to the player on your right. Then, you have two actions to choose from, or if you want to do both, then you have to spend workers from your pool. So many agonizing decisions!! But figuring out how it all works together, while trying to score objectives during three periods, was something I couldn’t wrap my head around until way too late into the game. I would definitely play again, probably on more than a few hours of sleep. It’s definitely Feld’s most complex game to date, in my opinion.
Making agonizing decisions about which chit to pass to your neighbor and which one to keep for yourself.
Next I played Gugong with @ruelgaviola and @geekygaymerguy, who I met for the first time and is just as fantastic and friendly in real life! Theo taught Ruel Gugong, and the game immediately went onto his to-buy list. Gugong is set during the Ming Dynasty, and officials want fancy gifts in exchange for favors. On their turn, players use cards in their hand to activate various locations on the map by playing a card in higher value than what’s sitting there already. You place your card down, pick up the old card and put it into your discard pile. Your pile of discarded cards will then become your hand of actions in the next round.
I had a blast playing with all these wonderful people! Insert all the heart-eye emojis!
The game has an added element of managing your cubes from the general supply to your personal supply, a mechanism that I personally love, as well as moving up various tracks on the board and getting bonuses for picking up the right card for the round. I heard the KS version is just gorgeous but I think the base game is just as beautiful, and really, you can just spend a few bucks buying glass beads to replace the jade on the board.
Gugong is such a great midweight euro, and I totally want to add this to my collection.
I then purchased the only game at the con: Targi. Targi is a tense, puzzly 2-player game that I just learned the month before, and it definitely has moments where you can be so mean. I love it! A grid of cards are laid out on the table between two players, and they take turns placing one of their meeples on action spots on the outside border. Where their three meeples intersect can create a fourth and fifth action for the round. But you can’t place your meeple in front of your opponent, so they can block you from gaining resources or collecting cards, and forcing you to take a less-than-ideal action because that’s the last space left. Meanwhile, you’re also building your tableau of tribe cards you’ve collected, which gives you VPs from the cards itself and how you arrange it in front of you. I highly recommend this game! (Even if my buddy Mark is all kinds of mean.)
Mark plotting to take a mean action against me in Targi.
Next, I checked out Drop It from the library, and boy, am I horrible at this game! It’s a light, dexterity game in which you’re dropping various pieces into this plastic contraption, and you get points based on where it lands, a la Plinko. But if your piece lands and touches a piece of the same color or shape, you get zero points. Fun for the kids and light gamers!
I could not for the life of me drop my pieces in a way that they would score!
I then ran into Kevin and showed taught me his new game Calico, which is planning to be on Kickstarter out in the fall. This quilting game that features cats is a puzzly tile-laying game. Players have two hex tiles in their hands, and they place one on their turn into their player board, which starts with three objective tiles on it. The objectives will score points based on what surrounds it as tiles come in various colors and patterns. There are also cat tokens you can gain based on pattern requirements or clusters on the board as those pretty things keep the cats happy.
Calico is a tile-laying game in which you’re scoring objectives and keeping cats content.
We then played Carpe Diem, another Feld game that I really, really like! You’re building a district onto your player board by picking up a tile on the main board at one location. Then, you can only move your meeple into two different spots from that location (making a five-pointed star on the board), so getting somewhere may require a few turns. But by then, the tile you need might not be there. At the end of each round, which there are four of them, you are required to fulfill two objective on the side board. If you cannot fulfill an objective, you get negative points. Each objective intersection can only be scored by one person during the entire game, so it’s also a race to score them first if you can. The game itself is plagued by some production issues (the green and dark green are very hard to distinguish), but overall, it’s a smooth Feld game that plays in about an hour.
I’ve played Carpe Diem twice and have won both times! #winning
Lastly, I taught a game of Newton. It has been about 6 months since I’ve played this so I was a little rusty on the rules, but it’s a fun midweight tight euro game that plays in about two hours. You play cards onto your player board, which allow you to take a specific action depending on the symbol of the card. If you play another card with the same symbol in the same round, then that action’s strength will increase — either moving farther along your route or accessing more powerful cards or covering harder-to-reach bookcases. It’s really satisfying when you make some good combos!
Newton always ends so quickly, and I can never fill up my bookcase!
And then just like that, two days in Las Vegas were over. I’m pretty surprised that I didn’t even hit up the casino because in a previous life pre-board games, I went to Vegas a lot! And like growing up in Los Angeles, it was an easy weekend getaway for fun and some debauchery. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?
I got a chance to meet Rahdo. What a nice guy! He said the top of my head was really warm.
Before the drive back home to Phoenix, I also visited Meepleville Cafe, but I’m planning to write a longer piece about that cool place next time. Stay tuned! All in all, Dice Tower West was a chill and fun convention. I had a wonderful time hanging out with friends and meeting lots of new gamers! I can’t wait to go back next year, hopefully for longer than two days, as there were lots of other folks I wanted to game with but just didn’t have time for.
Until next time, Dice Tower West! Thanks for creating an inviting and fun gaming space.
