Base price: $10.
4 / 6 players; there’s a 3-player variant too.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Scram! was provided by Bezier Games.
OrcaCon weekend! I’m just hanging out and writing in my downtime, and it’s going pretty well! We’re finishing up a bunch of reviews and almost certainly have more coming, so get excited! Played a lot of games this weekend. Most recently I’ve been digging into a few titles from Bezier, so you might see some castles or a suburban sprawl in the future. Who knows. In the meantime, however, let’s check out Scram!.
In Scram!, players are working to actively clean up their campsites that are currently overrun with the many creatures of the forest. That said, there’s something even more fun than cleaning up your campsite, which is slowly directing the animals to your opponents’ campsites. It’s not the most ethical move, strictly speaking, but you’re not a park ranger and anything goes. Will you be able to have the cleanest campsite?
Contents
Setup
Setup is pretty straightforward. Shuffle the deck of cards. Deal three cards face-down and two cards face-up to every player; they should place the cards in front of them. That’s about it for setup!
Gameplay
A game of Scram! takes place over four rounds as players try to clear out their campsites! They’re full of weird critters. And that’s okay. You don’t necessarily have the ability to completely clear your campsite; you just need to make sure your team’s campsite is cleaner than your opponent’s!
Not a ton of complexity, gameplay-wise. On your turn you can either take a card or declare Scram!. Let’s talk about each.
Taking a Card
When you take a card, you draw either the top card of the deck or the top card of the discard pile. Then you choose how to use it.
- Action: For cards with a value above 5, you can discard them face-up to use the action on the card. You may not do this with a card you drew from the discard pile.
- Discard: If you don’t like or want the card, you can just discard it. You … can’t do this if you took the card from the discard pile, though. That would essentially just be nothing.
- Replace Cards: You may replace one or more cards in your campsite with the card you just drew, keeping it face-down if you drew it from the draw deck or face-up if you drew it from the discard pile. Here’s the interesting thing, though: you can also replace cards in your teammates’ campsites, provided you replace at least one of your own as well! To do so, select all of the cards (face-up / face-down doesn’t matter) that you want to replace with the card you just drew. Once you’ve done that, reveal them. If they all match, they’re discarded and the card you just drew goes to your campsite. Note that an equals sign (=) matches any number. If any of them are different, you leave them as-is, the card you just drew goes to your campsite, and you potentially take a penalty:
- If there are three different values among the revealed cards, draw one face-down card and add it to your campsite without looking.
- If there are four different values among the revealed cards, draw two face-down cards and add them to your campsite without looking.
- If there are five or more different values among the revealed cards, draw three face-down cards and add them to your campsite without looking.
Either way, once you take a card and resolve it, your turn ends.
Declaring Scram!
If you think your team has fewer points than your opponent’s team and it’s likely to stay that way, you can declare Scram! (provided you have two or fewer cards in hand), ending your turn. Each other player takes one more turn and then the round ends!
End of Round
The round ends after the conclusion of a player declaring Scram! or if the deck runs out. At that time, all players calculate their total points from face-up and face-down cards. If one player declared Scram! and that player’s team has fewer points than the other team (or they’re tied), their team scores 0 for the round. Otherwise, they gain an additional 10 points. Record the teams’ scores and play another round.
End of Game
The game ends after four rounds; the team with fewer points wins!
Player Count Differences
Generally, there aren’t a ton of differences in how Scram! plays with multiple different player counts, though getting six players to sit through the rules explanation is its own challenge. What is interesting is the three-player game, since there, the solo player is just on their own team and takes a turn after each of the other two players. It mostly works fine, though they miss out on being able to have another player help them; they just have to help themselves. At six, it’s mostly the same thing since you just have a player from each team take a turn in order. You have a better chance of revealing two matching cards randomly, but otherwise, not a ton of changes. Logistically, I’m most likely to play this at four; don’t love the 1v2 idea and I just don’t often have six people around, even if I’m going to OrcaCon this weekend.
Strategy
- There’s some advantage to revealing cards relatively early. The more you can see, the more you can share with your partner(s). Naturally, you’d like to know what cards they have so that you can quickly determine what to discard and what to keep. This leads to a few early turns where you just might flip a card or two (or three) just so you can see what’s what.
- Be careful, though! If all cards are revealed, then the game is perfect information (and you might not be in the lead). The problem with being able to see everything and knowing everything is that you end up in a spot where your opponents also see and know everything. If you’re pretty significantly behind then you might find them declaring Scram! before you have a chance to whittle down your score.
- Declaring Scram! can be a bit dangerous, since the other team gets more turns than you. There’s a certain level of risk and reward to that. The reward is that if you’re right, you get 0; the risk is that if you’re wrong, your opponents scored lower than you and you get stuck with an extra 10 points. Not exactly ideal.
- Keeping track of what cards you’ve seen might be helpful. There are only so many cards of each value; if you remember which ones you’ve seen, you can remember which cards are completely spent and not necessarily take them (you don’t want a 12 you can only discard with an =, for instance).
- Be a bit judicious; you’d ideally like the total value of your campsite to decrease every round. It’s kind of the whole point of the game, to decrease the total value of your campsite. This means you should ostensibly try to chip away at it every round.
- Using card abilities can be pretty useful, so… do that. You generally get to discard the card after you play it (if it doesn’t say otherwise), so especially for high-value cards, using their abilities can be pretty handy to get rid of cards that might otherwise end up in your campsite.
- If I’m picking a player to mess with, I usually pick my opponent who took their turn most recently. This gives the longest time delay for them to react, generally speaking. Plus, sometimes you get lucky and doing that means that the next player, your opponent, can’t necessarily fix the mess you just made. This is, of course, situational, so there are plenty of situations where you might not do this.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Decently quick card game. Thirty minutes, more or less, even if you’re playing with four players because the rounds can move pretty quickly.
- The multi-round format does sufficiently punish players who Scram! incorrectly. I usually fuss a bit about games that have “play X rounds” without much of a change between games. I think Scram! still does that, to a certain extent, but if they didn’t have you play multiple rounds then there’d be no penalty to calling Scram! incorrectly (other than, I suppose, you lose). Less interesting that way.
- Very portable. It’s a nice small-box game, and I always appreciate that.
- The art is pleasant. It’s nice animals and such, and they’re cute, jovial, and a little cartoony. It’s a cute game to look at.
- I like the discovery mechanic of flipping multiple cards and hoping for a match; getting a random match feels incredible. I like that there’s also a penalty for doing it at too large of a scale, but flipping two random cards and having them be the same is pretty bad odds, so when it happens you feel like celebrating (even though you had almost no skill-based influence on the card).
- The scoring is pretty straightforward. You just sum your cards; since there’s no hands for you to keep track of, there’s no additional scoring you need to do, which is also nice.
Mehs
- It’s a bit annoying that playing a 13 to the campsite of a player who just declared Scram! is as good of a strategic move as it is; it just makes the game feel a bit swingy. There’s basically no counter to it unless their partner has a 13, so, it can be a huge swing if it’s played with some luck. This makes drawing one feel pretty powerful, which adds some swinginess to the game.
Cons
- I was a bit vexed by how aggressively long the rulebook is; there are a bunch of edge cases and clarifications that make the teach a bit frustratingly difficult, which made it hard to get this one to the table for so long. It’s like, 28 pages? For a card game? I’m aware that the rulebook is pretty small, but going through the entire thing can be a bit vexing for new players (or for me, trying to teach it rapidly to a group of folks). Feels like a miss on the rulebook editing, but I suppose there are a lot of edge cases.
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I think there’s a lot to like about Scram!. I think it’s relatively rare to find a very simple-to-play team game; honestly, one of my big fears is learning a new team-based game out of the box and letting my teammate down while I’m trying to figure out strategy. The game moves pretty quickly, though, so it’s easy to pick up a bit of strategy over a couple rounds and there’s enough runway to pull it off. It’s portable and has cute art, which is always good, and the quick play keeps the game moving from round to round. I will say that while it’s simple-to-play, I wouldn’t necessarily call it simple-to-learn; there’s a lot of rules in the rulebook for such a tiny game, and I found the rulebook a bit dense and hard to get through. There are a few edge cases that cause the game to feel a bit clunky at times, and I think aiming to process all of the possible cases in the rulebook led to some diminishing returns on that front. Oh well. If you’re looking for a quick team game and you’ve got a rules video or you just want to clear up a campsite, I’d recommend Scram!. I’ve had fun with it.
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