Usually there are 7-8 rounds before a winner is declared, which makes this fit nicely in the filler-length game space. With four players, a round usually doesn’t make it around the table twice, and with three, it generally doesn’t make it around the table three times. The rules are intuitive, and you can start playing almost instantly, yet people can be easily fooled by the shapes on the front of the cards.

Illusion is extraordinarily simple - I think you could even play this with small children - yet decidedly tricky. Play continues until somebody has collected three arrow cards. The winner is the previous player if everything is correct the winner is the challenger if something is out of order. All of the cards are flipped over, and the winner of the challenge takes the arrow card. (The gameplay here sort of resembles the Timeline or Cardline series.)Ī challenge happens when a player thinks something - and it doesn’t necessarily have to be the card played by the previous player - is out of order. For example, if there are already cards that have 20% red and 25% red on the table, and you think this one has 22% red, you’d put it between those. The goal here is to arrange them in ascending order by the designated color. Most of the game comes down to flipping cards and putting them in the row. Each player has one of two choices on their turn: (a) flip a card and put it in the card line, or (b) challenge. The other stack of cards shows an arrow with one of the colors.Īt the start of each round, one of the arrow cards is shown, and play begins clockwise. These have an eccentric series of designs on the front, and on the back, they show the percentage of the design for each color (red, yellow, green, or blue). First, there’s a large stack of the cards containing the illusions. Wolfgang Warsch has been on quite a streak this year - he designed The Mind, Ganz schön clever, and Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg - and Illusion is arguably his lightest game, but like the others, it is kind of addicting. Illusion was released several months ago in Germany by publisher Nurnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag (NSV), and the English-language release was at Gen Con by Pandasaurus Games. The twist is that the cards form a sort of optical illusion, and the task is trickier than you’d expect. Illusion is a card game in which players attempt to order cards by the percentage of a color - red, yellow, green, or blue - shown on them.

Illusion games 2017