At a gathering yesterday, a friend pulled out a paper box smaller than a palm and said he wanted to teach us to play a light party game called SCOUT.
I took one look at the cards inside—all bare numbers—and thought: isn't this just a reskinned Dou Dizhu or Uno? What fun could there be in it?
But after ten minutes of playing, the whole table went silent, because this game's mechanisms are simply too counterintuitive!
1. A compulsive's hell where you absolutely must not sort your cards
Everyone who plays cards has a habit—after drawing, you definitely sort your hand in order, right? But in SCOUT, whatever order you draw your cards in is the order you must keep them in; you absolutely cannot change the relative positions of your hand cards!
You watch helplessly as a 9 and another 9 are separated by a 2 in between, and you just cannot pull them out to form a pair. That compulsive urge to forcibly sort your cards will really drive you crazy in the first two rounds. You can only rely on "playing" or "drawing" cards to slowly stitch together your fragmented hand combos.
2. An extremely twisted double-sided number setting
That's not all—the top and bottom ends of each card are printed with different numbers. Before the game starts, you can decide whether to hold the whole deck upright or upside down.
Once chosen, hands off—no take-backs! I often, out of greed for a straight up top, give up a three-with-one down below, only to find halfway through that I completely can't get rid of my cards, and they rot in my hand as I get deducted a ton of points.
3. The brilliant SCOUT mechanism of "stealing" when you can't beat them
The most awesome part of this game is that if your play can't beat the cards on the table, you can choose to "SCOUT" (that is, take one card someone else has played on the table and stuff it into any position in your hand).
This is simply a stroke of genius! Not only does it sabotage others' scoring, but it can also instantly stitch the cards in your hand that originally couldn't connect into an invincible ultimate move. That late-game feeling of enduring for ages and then suddenly throwing out a 7-card straight to clear your hand in an instant really makes you slap your thigh.
To sum up:
If you have that friend at gatherings who always keeps their head down playing on their phone, or thinks the rules are too long and doesn't want to listen, just shove SCOUT right in their face. Explain the rules in 3 minutes, and 5 minutes later they'll absolutely be shouting "one more round."
But this game extremely tests your luck of the draw and local planning. If you're a score-calculating maniac with an extremely low tolerance for error, then this experience of "a bad starting hand means you can only slowly scrape by" might make you a bit uncomfortable.
Hey bros, when you play SCOUT, what's the longest straight you've ever drawn in your starting hand? Have you ever had an experience where one set of cards instantly wiped out the whole table?
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